Comparative Method - Demonstrating Genetic Relationship - Origin and Development of The Method

Origin and Development of The Method

Languages have been compared since antiquity. For example, in the 1st century BC the Romans were aware of the similarities between Greek and Latin, which they explained mythologically, as the result of Rome being a Greek colony speaking a debased dialect. In the 9th or 10th century, Yehuda Ibn Quraysh compared the phonology and morphology of Hebrew, Aramaic, and Arabic, but attributed this resemblance to the Biblical story of Babel, with Abraham, Isaac and Joseph retaining Adam's language, with other languages at various removes becoming more altered from the original Hebrew.

In publications of 1647 and 1654, Marcus van Boxhorn first described a rigid methodology for historical linguistic comparisons and proposed the existence of an Indo-European proto-language (which he called "Scythian") unrelated to Hebrew, but ancestral to Germanic, Greek, Romance, Persian, Sanskrit, Slavic, Celtic and Baltic languages. The Scythian theory was further developed by Andreas Jäger (1686) and William Wotton (1713), who made first forays to reconstruct this primitive common language. In 1710 and 1723, Lambert ten Kate first formulated the regularity of sound laws, introducing among others, the term root vowel.

Another early systematic attempt to prove the relationship between two languages on the basis of similarity of grammar and lexicon was made by the Hungarian János Sajnovics in 1770, when he attempted to demonstrate the relationship between Sami and Hungarian (work that was later extended to the whole Finno-Ugric language family in 1799 by his countryman Samuel Gyarmathi), But the origin of modern historical linguistics is often traced back to Sir William Jones, an English philologist living in India, who in 1786 made his famous observation:

“The Sanscrit language, whatever be its antiquity, is of a wonderful structure; more perfect than the Greek, more copious than the Latin, and more exquisitely refined than either, yet bearing to both of them a stronger affinity, both in the roots of verbs and the forms of grammar, than could possibly have been produced by accident; so strong indeed, that no philologer could examine them all three, without believing them to have sprung from some common source, which, perhaps, no longer exists. There is a similar reason, though not quite so forcible, for supposing that both the Gothick and the Celtick, though blended with a very different idiom, had the same origin with the Sanscrit; and the old Persian might be added to the same family.”

The comparative method developed out of attempts to reconstruct the proto-language mentioned by Jones, which he did not name, but subsequent linguists named Proto-Indo-European (PIE). The first professional comparison between the Indo-European languages known then was made by the German linguist Franz Bopp in 1816. Though he did not attempt a reconstruction, he demonstrated that Greek, Latin and Sanskrit shared a common structure and a common lexicon. Friedrich Schlegel in 1808 first stated the importance of using the eldest possible form of a language when trying to prove its relationships; in 1818, Rasmus Christian Rask developed the principle of regular sound changes to explain his observations of similarities between individual words in the Germanic languages and their cognates in Greek and Latin. Jacob Grimm - better known for his Fairy Tales - in Deutsche Grammatik (published 1819-37 in four volumes) made use of the comparative method in attempting to show the development of the Germanic languages from a common origin, the first systematic study of diachronic language change.

Both Rask and Grimm were unable to explain apparent exceptions to the sound laws that they had discovered. Although Hermann Grassmann explained one of these anomalies with the publication of Grassmann's law in 1862, it was Karl Verner who in 1875 made a methodological breakthrough when he identified a pattern now known as Verner's law, the first sound law based on comparative evidence showing that a phonological change in one phoneme could depend on other factors within the same word, such as the neighbouring phonemes and the position of the accent, now called conditioning environments.

Similar discoveries made by the Junggrammatiker (usually translated as Neogrammarians) at the University of Leipzig in the late 1800s led them to conclude that all sound changes were ultimately regular, resulting in the famous statement by Karl Brugmann and Hermann Osthoff in 1878 that "sound laws have no exceptions". This idea is fundamental to the modern comparative method, since the method necessarily assumes regular correspondences between sounds in related languages, and consequently regular sound changes from the proto-language. This Neogrammarian Hypothesis led to application of the comparative method to reconstruct Proto-Indo-European, with Indo-European being at that time by far the most well-studied language family. Linguists working with other families soon followed suit, and the comparative method quickly became the established method for uncovering linguistic relationships.

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