Sound Shifts Sounds shifts are a great way to find similarities and differences within and among differences. A sound shift is a slight change in a word across languages within a subfamily or through a language family from the present backward toward its origin For example: Italian, French, and Spanish are all members of the Romance language. Linguists know this by looking at the sound shifts for different words across time.

Sounds Shifts Cont. The Latin word for milk lacte, becomes latta in Italian, leche in Spanish, and lait in French. Also, the Latin word for eight, oto, became otto, ocho, and buit. Even if we didn’t know that these words originated from Latin, we can look at the similarities in the sound shifts of particular words.

William Jones Jones undertook the study of Sanskrit, the language in which ancient Indian religious and literary texts were written. He discovered that Sanskrit vocabulary bore a remarkable resemblance to ancient Greek and Latin vocabulary

Jakob Grimm Grimm suggested that sound shifts might prove the relationships between languages in a scientific manner, saying that related languages have similar but not identical consonants. He believed that hard consonants would change over time, becoming softer. Example: the v and t in the German word vater, softened into vader (Dutch) and then father (English).

Proto-Indo-European From Jones’ and Grimm’s ideas came to first major linguistic hypothesis, the ancestral Indo-European language called Proto-Indo- European. This hypothesis says that most of the major European language formed from this ancestral language, breaking off to form new languages as time went on.

Backward and Deep Reconstruction Linguists use backward reconstruction to track sound shifts and hardening of consonants “backward” toward the original language. Deep reconstruction is used when it is necessary to go back even further and re- create the language that preceded an extinct language.

The Work of Vladislav Illich-Svitych & Aharon Dolgopolsky Both these Russian scholars began working in the 1960s, each using deep reconstruction to re-create ancient languages. They used words they thought were the most stable of a language’s vocabulary. They worked independently, unaware of each others research. However, when they finally met, they found that their findings were remarkably similar. They found key characteristics of the Proto-Indo- European language and its ancient ancestor, the Nostratic language.

The Nostratic Language Nostratic is believed to be the ancestral language of the Prot-Indo-European language, Kartvelian languages of the southern Caucasus region, the Uralic-Altaic languages, the Dravidian languages of India, and the Afro-Asiatic language family. They vocabulary had no names for domesticated animals, suggesting that they Nostratic speakers were hunter and gathers, not farmers. They name for “dog” and “wolf” were the same as well, suggesting that the domestication of wolves occurred at this time.

Nostratic Language

Language Divergence and Convergence Languages can form through language divergence and convergence Language divergence occurs when spatial interaction among speakers of a language breaks down and the language fragments first into dialects and then into discrete tongues. If people with different languages have consistent spatial interaction, language convergence can occur, collapsing the two languages into one.

The Renfrew Hypothesis Developed by Colin Renfrew regarding his idea of how the Proto-Indo-European language diffused. Claims that from Anatolia (present day Turkey) diffused Europe’s Indo-European languages; from the western arc of the Fertile Crescent came the languages of North Africa and Arabia; and from the Fertile Crescent’s eastern arc spread into present day Iran, Pakistan, and India.