Language change

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Naninanik indra languange changek indra

Nim : 11214204200

STUDENT OF ENGLISH EDUCATION DEPARMENT

SEMESTER V

FACULTY EDUCATION AND TEACHER TRAINING

STATE ISLAMIC UNIVERSITY SULTAN SYARIF KASIM RIAU

2014

INTRODUCTION

In speaking to one another, we make use of sentences, or, to be more precise, utterances.In recent years a number of philosophers have had interesting things to say about what utterances do as well as mean, observing that part of the total meaning is this very doing. As soon as we look closely at conversation in general, we see that it involves much more than using language to state propositions or convey facts.

One thing that many utterances do is make propositions: they do this mainly in the form of either statements or questions but other grammatical forms are also possible.

We are able to converse with one another because we recognize common goals in conversation and specific ways of achieving these goals. In any conversation, only certain kinds of ‘moves’ are possible at any particular time because of the constraints that operate to govern exchanges. These constraints limit speakers as to what they can say and listeners as to what they can infer.

CONTENT

Languange Change

Language is always changing. We've seen that language changes across space and across social group. Language also varies across time.Generation by generation, pronunciations evolve, new words are borrowed or invented, the meaning of old words drifts, and morphology develops or decays. The rate of change varies, but whether the changes are faster or slower, they build up until the "mother tongue" becomes arbitrarily distant and different. After a thousand years, the original and new languages will not be mutually intelligible. After ten thousand years, the relationship will be essentially indistinguishable from chance relationships between historically unrelated languages.In isolated subpopulations speaking the same language, most changes will not be shared. As a result, such subgroups will drift apart linguistically, and eventually will not be able to understand one another.the modern world, language change is often socially problematic. Long before divergent dialects lose mutual intelligibility completely, they begin to show difficulties and inefficiencies in communication, especially under noisy or stressful conditions. Also, as people observe language change, they usually react negatively, feeling that the language has "gone down hill". You never seem to hear older people commenting that the language of their children or grandchildren's generation has improved compared to the language of their own youth.

Why They Change

nanik indra, languang changenanik indra

Languages change for a variety of reasons. Large-scale shifts often occur in response to social, economic and political pressures. History records many examples of language change fueled by invasions, colonization and migration. Even without these kinds of influences, a language can change dramatically if enough users alter the way they speak it.  Frequently, the needs of speakers drive language change. New technologies, industries, products and experiences simply require new words. Plastic, cell phones and the Internet didn’t exist in Shakespeare’s time, for example. By using new and emerging terms, we all drive language change. But the unique way that individuals speak also fuels language change. That’s because no two individuals use a language in exactly the same way. The vocabulary and phrases people use depend on where they live, their age, education level, social status and other factors. Through our interactions, we pick up new words and sayings and integrate them into our speech. Teens and young adults for example, often use different words and phrases from their parents. Some of them spread through the population and slowly change the language.

Types of Change

Three main aspects of language change over time: vocabulary, sentence structure and pronunciations. Vocabulary can change quickly as new words are borrowed from other languages, or as words get combined or shortened. Some words are even created by mistake. As noted in the Linguistic Society of America's publication Is English Changing?, pea is one such example. Up until about 400 years ago, pease referred to either a single pea or many peas. At some point, people mistakenly assumed that the word pease was the plural form of pea, and a new word was born. While vocabulary can change quickly, sentence structure—the order of words in a sentence—changes more slowly. Yet it’s clear that today’s English speakers construct sentences very differently from Chaucer and Shakespeare’s contemporaries (see illustration above). Changes in sound are somewhat harder to document, but at least as interesting. For example, during the so-called “Great Vowel Shift” 500 years ago, English speakers modified their vowel pronunciation dramatically. This shift represents the biggest difference between the pronunciations of so called Middle and Modern English

Types of change

Language change may be broadly divided into two categories:

 1. external  change, is mainly caused by the adoption of borrowing..

 2. internal change. internal change is caused by the addition and loss of sounds and lexical items, coinages of new words and extensions

 There are 3 major types of language change : lexical, grammatical;, sound levels.

1.      Sound Level describe the passage of historical transition  from a given phoneme or group of phonems to another.. eg. The cange of Germanic /sk/ into old English /sh/. There are 3 type  of changes :

·         Phonetic change : affects the manner of articulation

·         Influence of neighboring sound example from /y/y (mys) English to /I;/ (mice) in modern English

·         Apocope omission of some vowel from the end of a word eg. Shild as chile

·         Phonemic change affects the pronounsation or sound system structures eg. /3/ (as in meat or read) or /e:/ (As in meet or reed)

2.      Grammatical level refers to change grammar and vocabulary. I this proses,morphs,combination of morph or linguistic pattern are modified there are 3 types :

·         Morphological change language as analogy eg. Middle englis plural from cow was kine modern English cow/cows bull/bulls

·         Syntactic change lexical words increasilingly adopt a grammatical function example will meant want.

3.       lexical level refers to change in the meaning of word. There are 3 types:

·         loss lexical item same phonemic structure but different meaning

·         change of meaning semantic change due to historical or phisicological factors

·         creation of new lexical item eg.external from French words “crow” pwer. Internal “bird” as gril from bride

SOUND CHANGE: Traditionally historical linguistic studies begin with sound change which is a term to describe the passage of historical transition from a given phoneme or  group of phonemes to another, e.g. the change of Germanic [sk] into Old English [sh].  There are various theories that justify the causes of sound change.  The first is that sound change is brought about by anatomical changes within the population.  Others assign sound change to social and historical reasons and discover a link between political instability and linguistic instability.

1.      Old English [x] (voiceless velar fricative) is everywhere lost as such, but usually leaves traces behind (cheshirization). In furh "furrow" and mearh "marrow", it vocalizes. It is elided (albeit with varying effects on the preceding vowel, such as lengthening) in night, knight, might, taught, naught, freight, fought, plow (Brit. plough, OE plōh), bought, through, though, slaughter; but /f/ in laugh, trough, tough, enough (and daughter can be found in The Pilgrim's Progress riming with after, indeed the spelling dafter is actually attested) The /x/ phoneme still exists in some onomatopoeiac words, like "ugh" (note the spelling uses "gh", which indicates that [when coined] there was still some understanding of "gh"s meaning in regard to phonemes), "yech" and "chutzpah".

2.      /g k/ are lost in English in word-initial position before /n/: gnaw, gnat, knight, know. /t/ is lost after fricatives before nasals and /l/: soften, castle, bristle, chestnut, Christmas, hasten

3.      In many words /f/ (that is, Old English [v]) was lost between vowels: auger, hawk, newt < OE nafogar, hafoc, efete ("lizard"), and in some alternative (poetic) forms: e'en "evening", o'er "over", e'er "ever"; Scottish siller "silver", and others.

Language change is variation over time in a language's phonetic, morphological, semantic, syntactic, and other

features.

Phonetics, Phonology This is the level of sounds. One must distinguish here between the set of possible human sounds, which constitutes the area of phonetics proper, and the set of system sounds used in a given human language, which constitutes the area of phonology. Phonology is concerned with classifying the sounds of language and with saying how the subset used in a particular language is utilised, for instance what distinctions in meaning can be made on the basis of what sounds.

 Morphology This is the level of words and endings, to put it in simplified terms. It is what one normally understands by grammar (along with syntax). The term morphology refers to the analysis of minimal forms in language which are, however, themselves comprised of sounds and which are used to construct words which have either a grammatical or a lexical function. Lexicology is concerned with the study of the lexicon from a formal point of view and is thus closely linked to (derivational) morphology.

 Syntax This is the level of sentences. It is concerned with the meanings of words in combination with each other to form phrases or sentences. In particular, it involves differences in meaning arrived at by changes in word order, the addition or subtraction of words from sentences or changes in the form of sentences. It furthermore deals with the relatedness of different sentence types and with the analysis of ambiguous sentences Language typology attempts to classify languages according to high-order principles of morphology and syntax and to make sets of generalisations across different languages irrespective of their genetic affiliations, i.e. of what language family they belong to.

Semantics This is the area of meaning. It might be thought that semantics is covered by the areas of morphology and syntax, but it is quickly seen that this level needs to be studied on its own to have a proper perspective on meaning in language. Here one touches, however, on practically every other level of language as well as there exists lexical, grammatical, sentence and utterance meaning. Semantic change.

. They include:

• pejoration, in which a term acquires a negative association
• amelioration, in which a term acquires a positive association
• widening, in which a term acquires a broader meaning
• narrowing, in which a term acquires a narrower meaning

The appearance of a new word marks only the beginning of its existence. Once generally adopted as part of the language, the meanings and applications it has for speakers can shift dramatically, to the point of causing misunderstandings. For example, "villain" once meant a peasant or farmhand, but has come to imply a criminal individual in modern English. This exemplifies a word that has undergone pejoration, which means that a negative association has become attached to it. Conversely, other words have undergone amelioration where a more positive meaning prevails. Thus, the word 'wicked' (generally meaning 'evil'), as of 2009 means 'brilliant' in slang or in a colloquial context.

Other ways of semantic change include narrowing and broadening. Narrowing a word semantically limits its alternative meanings. For example the word "girl" once meant 'a young child' and "hound" (Old English hund) referred to any dog, whereas in modern English it demotes a particular type of canid. Examples of words that have been broadened semantically include "dog" (which once referred to a particular breed).

Pragmatics The concern here is with the use of language in specific situations. The meaning of sentences need not be the same in an abstract form and in practical use. In the latter case one speaks of utterance meaning. The area of pragmatics relies strongly for its analyses on the notion of speech act which is concerned with the actual performance of language. This involves the notion of proposition – roughly the content of a sentence – and the intent and effectof an utterance.           

Causes of language change

v  Economy: Speakers tend to make their utterances as efficient and effective as possible to reach communicative goals. Purposeful speaking therefore involves a trade-off of costs and benefits.

v  the principle of least effort: Speakers especially use economy in their articulation, which tends to result in phonetic reduction of speech forms. See vowel reduction, cluster reduction, lenition, and elision. After some time a change may become widely accepted (it becomes a regular sound change) and may end up treated as a standard. For instance: going to [ˈɡoʊ.ɪŋ.tʊ] → gonna [ˈɡɔnə] or [ˈɡʌnə], with examples of both vowel reduction [ʊ] → [ə] and elision [nt] → [n], [oʊ.ɪ] → [ʌ].

v  Analogy: reducing word forms by likening different forms of the word to the root.

v   Language contact: borrowing of words and constructions from foreign languages.

v  The medium of communication.

v   Cultural environment: Groups of speakers will reflect new places, situations, and objects in their language, whether they encounter different people there or not

CONCLUSION

Language is always changing. We've seen that language changes across space and across social group. Language also varies across time.Generation by generation, pronunciations evolve, new words are borrowed or invented, the meaning of old words drifts, and morphology develops or decays. The rate of change varies, but whether the changes are faster or slower, they build up until the "mother tongue" becomes arbitrarily distant and different. After a thousand years, the original and new languages will not be mutually intelligible. After ten thousand years, the relationship will be essentially indistinguishable from chance relationships between historically unrelated languages.In isolated subpopulations speaking the same language, most changes will not be shared. As a result, such subgroups will drift apart linguistically, and eventually will not be able to understand one another.the modern world, language change is often socially problematic. Long before divergent dialects lose mutual intelligibility completely, they begin to show difficulties and inefficiencies in communication, especially under noisy or stressful conditions