A | B | C | D | English |
ka | ka | ko | zimi | ‘we’ |
nami | name | nom | soo | ‘two’ |
paluma | paroma | polm | jai | ‘eye’ |
litiki | redege | riik | enefo | ‘mother’ |
kutusu | kodozo | kuts | vaha | ‘water’ |
panu | pano | pon | haaz | ‘eat’ |
In the comparative method, we're looking for regular phonological correspondences (which I'll abbreviate to RPCs). That is, given a set of words from each of the languages in question, we want to see if there is a regular pattern of phonemes that occurs between the items in the set. For example, look at the words for 'we' and 'water'. In all three of languages A, B, and C, these words begin with the phoneme k-. Likewise, in the words for 'eye', and 'eat', all the words in A, B, and C all begin with the phoneme p-. And in the word for 'two', we find all the words in A, B, and C beginning in n-. These are all examples of RPCs.
The phonemes don't all have to be the same to be regular. In the words for 'eye' and 'mother', language A has -l- whereas language B has -r-. Likewise, in 'we', 'two', 'eye', and 'eat, languages A and B have -a- where language C has -o-. These correspondences are just as regular as the k-, p-, and n- correspondences because they recur in multiple sets of words.
Now, what about language D? A close comparison between the different phonemes in language D's words and those of languages A, B, and C, reveals no meaningful correspondences; this suggests that D is not genetically related, or at least not closely genetically related, to languages A, B, and C, which, due to their numerous correspondences, seem to be very closely genetically related.
Now, a set of 6 words is not nearly enough to make conclusions about genetic relationships. Ideally, several hundred word sets should be selected, including not just nouns, verbs, or adjectives, but grammatical items such as plural markers on nouns, person, number, and tense markers on verbs, prepositions, different pronoun forms, etc. The more functional the items examined (those parts of the vocabulary which contribute more structure than meaning), the more solid the conclusions that can be drawn about genetic relationships.
Now, as an exercise for you the reader, here is a set of data from 5 European languages. Many of you will be familiar with at least some of these languages, but I'm going to change their spelling to make them slightly less recognizable, and also to reflect their true pronunciation a little better. Your task is to examine the word sets, look for regular phonological correspondences, and make a guess as to which languages are genetically related to which others (or which are more closely related to which, if it seems that they are all ultimately related).
A | B | C | D | E | English |
ik | io | zhuh | ih | yo | ‘I’ |
maan | luna | lyn | | luna | ‘moon’ |
zyster | sorella | sur | shvester | ermana | ‘sister’ |
vyyr | fwoko | fuh | foyer | fwego | ‘fire’ |
akht | otto | wit | akht | ocho | ‘eight’ |
vut | piede | pie | fus | pie | ‘foot’ |
drinken | bere | bwar | trinken | bever | ‘drink’ |
Bonus question: to which of the above do you think English is most closely related? What phonological correspondences can you name between English and that (or those) languages? Remember to concentrate on pronunciation, not spelling, since how a word is spelled may not reflect its pronunciation accurately.
4 comments:
Nice posts! You write in an educational style which as a layperson I appreciate.
Regarding the challenge question, I would have to guess either A or C, although I believe it's A.
I am sure you are building up to this question. So do linguists actually break out gigantic spreadsheets of words from different languages to find phonological correspondence? Even if there are recognized similarities, how is this information used to trace back to a meta language. I am also curious, how much are linguists utilizing software algorithms to compare these phonological similarities?
Great questions, dude. We do indeed have to break out the gigantic spreadsheets (I have one going for the six of the Germanic languages - I'm attempting a reconstruction on my own to test my skills), but we usually don't do it by ourselves of course. As for algorithms, Professor Bill Croft at UNM was talking to me about work in that field a few months ago - he mentioned that some linguists have been trying to compile all of the most common phonological mutations to create a program that could help in comparative reconstruction work. It would definitely be easier than going through thousands of word sets by hand (by eye?).
I'll talk in depth about the goal of the comparative method in the next post, but it's basically to reconstruct the ancestral form of a set of genetically related languages, which gives us insight into the linguistic situation of a particular cultural at a particular point in time.
And, you're correct - A is the most closely related to English in the set (it's Dutch), but D is the next closest (German). C is French, which may have looked more similar to you because of areal effects - French has had a huge impact on the English language, which I could talk about in a future post.
Akh! the knowledge hurts my brain!
Also Jason answered before I could.
I could recognize most of the languages, but not french.
B and E are also very closely related with C related more to those two than the other pair.
Hey, sorry about that Jalal. Next time I won't give away the answers immediately.
Well, since you and Jason are the only one's reading so far, I will say that you're correct, B and E are very close, and C is closer to them than to A and D. I'll talk about why this is the case and give some more examples in the next post.
I'm sure you recognized E as Spanish; B is Italian.
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