Re: I need help explaining basic linguistic concepts to a lay person

Heidi Graw wrote:

What Neeraj is referring to is the historical development that
turned hypothetical bh- and dh- (pronounced something like b'HA and
d'HA) into f- (pronounced f-) in latin, that is, during latin's
process of evolution and before it was recognisable latin (by which
time it had f- already).


I find this really interesting.  Can you give me a bit of a
background as to how this "hypothetical" bh- and dh- came about?


It was noticed that some languages exhibited systematic correspondences
of sounds, if not in all word, in some significant sets. For instance,
greek has h- in some places where latin has s-: halos/sal, hypos/sub.
Latin has c- in some places where germanic has h-: casa/house,
canis/hound. Over time, people realised such correspondences were so
many and so systematic that the most likely explanation is that the
languages in question have a common origin - i. e., were once the same
language and then diverged - and that some sounds, under some
circumstances, evolved differently.

Given, for instance, 3 languages, of which one has f- where the other
two have d-, it was hypothesized that the common point od origin had -d,
and later the 1st language turned it into f-. These reasonings are not
so simple, but weighed by general empirical knowledge on what sound
changes are more likely, and specific knowledge on how the particular
sounds of the languages under study interact. For instance, the d > f
change might be much rarer than the reverse (it's not), suggesting that
the language with f- was the one preserving the original. Or it might be
simpler to explain other developments of the follwing vowel if an
ancestral f- were postulated.

With a great amount of work, it was possible to reconstruct a common
vocabulary for the Indo-European languages (nearly all those of Europe,
Iran and India), from which, using only regular sound change laws (that
is, they have no exceptions; any exceptions must be explained by some
nuance on the law, applicable to more than one case), it is possible to
precisely derive the extant forms.

Of course no one knows for sure how the proposed aspiration (as in bh,
dh) was pronounced, but neither are linguists very concerned with that;
what they care about is that there was some phonetic element there,
which probably was some aspiration, which probably was not too far away
from the english h.

There's actually a whole class of hypothesized consonants, the
laryngeals, the pronunciation of which is everyone's guess.

This field is called Historical Linguistics and it's actually very
rigorous, unlike what may seem. That doesn't mean that there is
consensus; for any given situation, there may be always different
explanations / sets of slightly different rules between which there's
just not enough data to decide. Sometimes, such data appears.
--
am

laurus : rhodophyta : brezoneg : smalltalk : stargate
.

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