Comparative And Historical Linguistics In The 19th Century

Before 19th- century scholars were not very much interested in historical linguistics and were remained unnoticed that language has gone through many changes. Since starting of the 19th century, historical linguistics have undergone many changes with time it has led to major revisions and modifications to the theory and practice in this field. Historical linguistics investigates and describes the language change and how languages maintain their structure during the course of time. Those changes are still in progress and were noticed by the work of the William Labov who has dealt with the social, linguistic study of ‘New York City’ in 1966 where his investigation included 70 individual interviews- in the public places. These

This is counter-distinguished with ‘synchronic linguistics’ which deals with language in a single point of time. Historical linguistics dates back from the late 18th century. It grew out of the earlier discipline of philology.

1.2. The rise of comparative method: Comparative and historical linguistics were often treated as a single discipline. Firstly the main concern of historical linguistics was to study about Comparative Linguistics in which linguists were concerned about how two languages are related to one another when they are derived from a common ancestor. This notion of comparative linguistics was given by Sir William Jones a British judge in India who studied ‘oriental languages and literature’ delivered a lecture in Calcutta entitled

Sound change and language change generally were considered to be bad signs of decay from an earlier ideal state. But from 19th century sound change has a very specific meaning in historical linguistics; it refers only those changes in pronunciation which are conditioned by the phonetic factor. Sound change can thus be defined as a very important factor of historical linguistics. First of all, it is only by knowing how sound change and how ‘same word has different representation in historical linguistics (as in old English ‘ure’ and modern English ‘our’). Secondly ‘sound change is regular without exceptions’. This fact of sound law was great boon to historical linguistics as it made a tracing of linguistic forms of any word through history much easier. The early work was mainly towards comparative morphology soon after that in 1980’s a group of young grammarians known as ‘neogrammarian’ (German junggrammatiker) were a German school of linguists (including Karl Burgman, Hermann Osthroff, Herman Paul, Eduard Sievers and Karl Verner) originally at the University of Leipzip in the last quarter of the 19th century, Neogrammarian slogan ‘sound laws suffers no exceptions’ (Osthoff and Burgmann1878) which earned the group a local nickname ‘die jumggrammatische richtung’. Later it was rephrased by the Verner (1872) ‘no exception without a rule’ or there must be rules for irregularities the