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The comparative method (in Comparative Linguistics ) is a technique used by linguists to demonstrate Genetic Relationships between Language s. It aims to prove that two or more historically attested languages are descended from a single Proto-language by comparing lists of Cognate terms. From these cognate lists, regular sound correspondences between the languages are established, and a sequence of regular sound changes can then be postulated which allows the proto-language to be reconstructed from its Daughter Language s. Relation is deemed certain only if a partial reconstruction of the common ancestor is feasible, and if regular sound correspondences can be established with chance similarities ruled out. Developed in the 19th century through the study of the Indo-European Languages , the comparative method remains the standard by which mainstream linguists judge whether two languages are related, with alternative Lexicostatistical methods widely considered to be unreliable. Potential problems with the comparative method have also arisen as a result of a number of advances in linguistic thought, in large part due to some of the "basic assumptions" of the comparative method. However, as Campbell (2004:146-7) observes, "What textbooks call the 'basic assumptions' of the comparative method might better be viewed as the consequences of how we reconstruct and of our views of sound change." TERMINOLOGY In the present context, ''related'' has a specific meaning: two languages are and French are both descended from Latin . Therefore, French and Spanish are considered to belong to the same family of languages, the Romance Languages .Beekes 1995:25 ''Descent'', in turn, is defined in terms of transmission across the generations: children learn a language from the parents' generation and are then influenced by their peers; they then transmit it to the next generation, and so on (how and why changes are introduced is a complicated, unresolved issue). A continuous chain of speakers across the centuries links Vulgar Latin to all of its modern descendants. However, it is possible for languages to have different degrees of relatedness. English , for example, is related to both German and Russian , but is more closely related to the former than it is to the latter. The reason for this is that although all three languages share a common ancestor, Proto-Indo-European , English and German also share as a more recent common ancestor one of the daughter languages of Proto-Indo-European, Proto-Germanic , while Russian does not. Therefore, English and German are considered to belong to a different subgroup of the Indo-European Language family, the Germanic Languages , than Russian (which belongs to the Slavic subgroup).Beekes 1995:22, 27-29 The division of related languages into sub-groups by the comparative method is accomplished by finding languages with large numbers of ''shared linguistic innovations'' from the parent language; two languages having many ''shared retentions'' from the parent language is not sufficient evidence of a sub-group. This definition of relatedness implies that even if two languages are quite similar in their vocabularies, they are not necessarily closely related. As a result of heavy Borrowing over the years from Arabic into Persian , Modern Persian in fact takes more of its Vocabulary from Arabic than from its direct ancestor, Proto-Indo-Iranian .Campbell 2000:1341. But under the definition just given, Persian is considered to be descended from Proto-Indo-Iranian, and not from Arabic. The comparative method is a method for proving relatedness in the sense just given, as well as a method for reconstructing the Sound System and vocabulary of the common ancestral language and uncovering the sound changes the languages of a family have undergone. ORIGIN AND DEVELOPMENT The first known systematic attempt to prove the relationship between two languages on the basis of similarity of is often traced back to Sir William Jones , an English Philologist living in India , who in 1782 made his famous observation: “The Sanskrit 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 Sanskrit; and the Old Persian might be added to the same family.” (Jones 1786, quoted in Lehman 1967 and Szemerényi 1996:4) An insight often attributed to Jones is conceiving of the idea of a '' Proto-language '', and consequently of the type of "family tree" model of language development (one proto-language splitting into various daughter languages, some of those then splitting again into further languages), upon which the comparative method is based. However, Jones' role in the development of these ideas has recently been called into question. According to the comparative linguist Lyle Campbell , the widely quoted passage from Jones has been removed from its proper context, and a reading of his work reveals his ideas of linguistic development as less clear. Many of the linguistic classifications proposed by Jones were also erroneous; for instance, he connected Austronesian languages with Sanskrit , and failed to include Slavic in the Indo-European family.Campbell, in press The comparative method itself developed out of the attempts to reconstruct the proto-language which Jones had hypothesized about, known as Proto-Indo-European (PIE). The first attempt to analyse the relationships between the Indo-European Languages was made by the German linguist Franz Bopp in 1816. Though he did not attempt a reconstruction, he tried to prove that Greek, Latin and Sanskrit were related by systematically demonstrating that they shared a both common structure and a common lexicon.Szemerenyi 1996:5-6. It was the German scholar - better known for his ''Fairy Tales'' - who in ''Deutsche Grammatik'' (published 1819-37 in four volumes) first made use of something resembling the modern comparative method in attempting to show the development of the Germanic Languages from a common origin, the first systematic study of Diachronic language change.Szemerényi 1996:7-8 Both Rask and Grimm were unable to explain apparent exceptions to the sound laws that they had discovered. Though the German linguist , made a methodological breakthrough when he formulated Verner's Law , the sound law which now bears his name, and which was the first sound law to use comparative evidence to show 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 :Szemerényi 1996:20 in other words, the modern concept of ''conditioning environments''. Similar discoveries were made by a group of young, radical German academics at the , 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. APPLICATION There is no concrete set of steps to be followed in the application of the comparative method, but linguists generally agree on the basic steps, which are as follows:Campbell 2004 Assemble potential cognate lists Genetic relationship between two (or more) languages can be established if they show a number of regular correspondences in native vocabulary, which means that there is a regularly recurring match between the phonetic structure of basic words with similar meanings.Lyovin 1997:2-3 Thus, this step simply involves making lists of words which are likely cognates among the languages being compared. For example, looking at the Polynesian Family Using sources such as Churchward 1959 for Tongan, and Pukui & Elbert 1986 for Hawaiian. The table is modified from Campbell 2004 and Crowley 1992 linguists would come up with a list similar to the following, although in practice a real list would be much longer: Caution needs to be exercised to avoid including borrowed the pronouns "they", "them", and "their(s)" from Norse . Oxford English Dictionary: They Establish correspondence sets Once potential cognate lists are established, the next step is to determine the regular sound correspondences they exhibit. The notion of regular correspondence is very important here: mere phonetic similarity, as between s first emphasized this point in the late 1800s, and their motto, "sound laws have no exceptions", has remained a fundamental axiom in historical linguistics to this day. For example, although the correspondence ''d-'' : ''d-'' (where the notation "A : B" means "A corresponds to B") in English and Latin ''day'' and ''dies'' above is not regular, English and Latin ''do'' exhibit a very regular correspondence of ''t-'' : ''d-''. For example:In Latin, represents . ''dingua'' is an Old Latin form of the word later attested as ''lingua'' Since a truly systematic correspondence can hardly be accidental, if alternative possibilities like massive borrowing can be ruled out, then the correspondence can be attributed to common descent. If there are many regular correspondence sets of this kind (the more the better), then common origin becomes a virtual certainty, particularly if some of the correspondences are non-trivial or unusual. Discover which sets are in complementary distribution During the time the comparative method was being developed (late 18th to late 19th century), two major developments occurred which improved the method's effectiveness. First, it was found that many sound changes are conditioned by a particular ''context''. Thus for example, in both , known to the Sanskrit Grammarian Pāṇini Sag 1974; Janda & Joseph 1989 and promulgated as a historical discovery by Hermann Grassmann in 1863 .
''Ca'' is the attested Sanskrit form for ''and''. This finding was made independently by several scholars during the 1870s. of consonants in Germanic Languages underwent a change that was determined by the position of the old Indo-European Accent . Following the change, the accent shifted across the board to initial position.Beekes 1995:130-131 Verner solved the puzzle by comparing the Germanic voicing pattern with data from Greek and Sanskrit accent. This stage of the comparative method, therefore, involves examining the correspondence sets discovered in step 2 and seeing which of them apply only in certain contexts. If two (or more) sets involve identical or similar sounds, and apply in Complementary Distribution , then the sets can be assumed to reflect a single original Phoneme . This is because "some sound changes, particularly conditioned sound changes, can result in a proto-sound being associated with more than one correspondence set".Campbell 2004:136 To take another example, the Romance Languages , descended from Latin , exhibit two different correspondence sets which both involve ''k'':
A more complex case involves consonant clusters in Proto-Algonquian , which have been notoriously difficult to reconstruct. The Algonquianist Leonard Bloomfield used the reflexes of the clusters in four of the daughter languages of Proto-Algonquian to come up with the following correspondence sets:Although the clusters are shown here ending in ''-k'', this also generally applies to clusters ending in any of the plosives. The table is modified after that in Campbell 2004:141
Reconstruct proto-phonemes
Another assumption used in determining a proto-phoneme is that the reconstruction should ideally involve as few sound changes as possible to arrive at the modern reflexes in the daughter languages. In other words, unless there is persuasive evidence to the contrary, whatever value is the most common reflex in the daughter languages should be reconstructed as the value of the proto-phoneme. For example, Algonquian Languages exhibit the following correspondence set: Vocabulary Words in the Algonquian Language Family Goddard 1974
Examine the reconstructed system typologically In the final step, the linguist takes all the proto- Phoneme s that have been reconstructed using steps 1-4, and checks to see how the system fits with what is currently known about Typological Constraints . For example, if the reconstructed phonemes fit together in the following hypothetical system, the linguist would be suspicious, because languages generally (though not always) tend to maintain symmetry in their phonemic inventories:
Even a symmetrical system can be typologically suspicious. For example, the Proto-Indo-European plosive inventory, as traditionally reconstructed,Beekes 1995:124 is as follows: Since the mid-20th century, a number of linguists have argued that this system is, at best, very suspicious typologically.Szemerényi 1996:143 They state that it is extremely unlikely, or maybe even impossible, for a language to have a voiced aspirated (. It has a large number of proponents but is not generally accepted.Szemerényi 1996:151-152 The reconstruction of proto-sounds and their historical transformations enables linguists to proceed further: they can compare grammatical Morpheme s (word-forming affixes and inflectional endings), patterns of Declension and Conjugation , and so on. The full reconstruction of an unrecorded protolanguage can never be complete (for example, proto- Syntax is far more elusive than Phonology or Morphology , and all elements of linguistic structure undergo inevitable erosion and gradual loss or replacement over time), but a consistent partial reconstruction can and must be attempted as proof of genetic relationship. LIMITATIONS A number of difficulties with aspects related to the method are now recognized,Lyovin 1997:4-5, 7-8 but the comparative method is still seen as being one of the most valuable tools in comparative linugistics, and linguists continue to use it widely; other proposed approaches to determining linguistic relationships and reconstructing proto-languages, such as Glottochronology and Mass Lexical Comparison , are considered flawed and unreliable by nearly all linguists.Campbell 2004:347-348; Lyovin 1997:8; Trask 1996 Linguists recognize, however, that results obtained with the comparative method are not historical fact. Fox (1997:141-2), for example, concludes: “The Comparative Method ''as such'' is not, in fact, historical; it provides evidence of linguistic relationships to which we may give a historical interpretation. ... increased knowledge about the historical processes involved has probably made historical linguists less prone to equate the idealizations required by the method with historical reality. ...Provided we keep interpretation of the results and the method itself apart, the Comparative Method can continue to be used in the reconstruction of earlier stages of languages.” Neogrammarian Hypothesis The foundation of the comparative method, and of comparative linguistics in general, is the Neogrammarian s' fundamental assumption that "sound laws have no exceptions." When it was initially proposed, critics of the Neogrammarians proposed an alternate position, summarized by the maxim "each word has its own history".Szemerényi 1996:23 The so-called Neogrammarian Hypothesis is now well-established and well-supported, though there remain some situations in which its application can yield faulty results. Borrowings, areal diffusion and random mutations Even the Neogrammarians recognized that, apart from the general sound change laws, languages are also subject to Borrowing s from other languages and other ''sporadic changes'' (such as irregular inflections, compounding, and abbreviation) that affect one word at a time, or small subsets of words. While borrowed words should be excluded from the analysis, on the grounds that they are not ''genetic'' by definition, they do add noise to the data, and thus may hide systematic laws or distort their analysis. Moreover, there is the danger of circular reasoning — namely, of assuming that a word has been borrowed solely because it does not fit the current assumptions about the regular sound laws. Attempts to apply the comparative method to languages which have been affected by the process of , making their identification all the more important; for instance, the East Asian Sprachbund threw the classification of such languages as Chinese , Korean , Japanese , and Vietnamese into several false classifications before correction. The other exceptions to the sound laws are a more serious problem, because they occur in generic language transmission. One example of such a sporadic change, with no apparent logical reason, is the Spanish word for "word", ''palabra''. By regular sound changes from the Latin ''parabŏla'', it should have become ''parabla'', but the ''r'' and ''l'' changed places by sporadic Metathesis .Campbell 2004:39 Analogy A source of sporadic changes that was recognized by the Neogrammarians themselves was Analogy , in which a word is sporadically changed to be closer to another word in the lexicon which is perceived as being somehow related to it. For example, the Russian word for ''nine'', by regular sound changes from Proto-Slavic , should have been , but is in fact . It is believed that the initial ' changed to ' due to influence of the word for "ten" in Russian, .Beekes 1995:79 Gradual application More recently, . While not invalidating the Neogrammarians' axiom that "sound laws have no exceptions", this does seem to show that sound laws do not always apply to all lexical items at the same time. As Hock (1991:446-7) notes, "While it probably is true in the long run every word has its own history, it is not justified to conclude as some linguists have, that therefore the Neogrammarian position on the nature of linguistic change is falsified." Problems with the ''Tree Model'' Another weakness of the comparative method lies in its reliance on the ''Tree Model'' (German ''Stammbaum'').Lyovin 1997:7-8 In this model, daughter languages are seen as branching out from the proto-language, gradually growing more and more distant from the proto-language through accumulated Phonological , Morpho-syntactic , and Lexical changes; and possibly splitting into further daughter languages. This model is usually represented by upside-down tree-like diagrams. For example, here is a diagram of the Uto-Aztecan family of languages, spoken throughout the southern and western United States and Mexico :The diagram is based on Mithun 1999 and Campbell 1997 language family. (Families are in bold, individual languages in ''italics''. Not all of the branches and languages are shown, for lack of space.)]] Wave model See Also: Wave model (linguistics) Since languages change gradually, there are long periods in which different dialects of a language, as they evolve into separate languages, remain in contact with one another and influence each other. Therefore, the '''':Based partly on the diagram found in Fox 1995:128, and Johannes Schmidt, 1872. ''Die Verwandtschaftsverhältnisse der indogermanischen Sprachen''. Weimar: H. Böhlau However, Hock (1991:454) observes: “The discovery in the late nineteenth century that Isogloss es can cut across well-established linguistic boundaries at first created considerable attention and controversy. And it became fashionable to oppose a wave theory to a tree theory... Today, however, it is quite evident that the phenomena referred to by these two terms are complementary aspects of linguistic change... However, in practice, it is generally preferable to use the traditional, simple tree model - if necessary supplemented by synchronic isogloss maps for relevant historical stages.” Non-uniformity of the proto-language Another assumption implicit in the methodology of the comparative method is that the proto-language is uniform. This is problematic, as even in extremely small language communities there are always Dialect Differences , whether based on area, gender, class, or other factors (the Pirahã Language of Brazil is spoken by only several hundred people, but has at least two different dialects, one spoken by men and one by women, for example).Aikhenvald & Dixon 1999:354; Ladefoged 2003:14 Therefore, the single proto-language reconstructed by the comparative method is an idealized language which never existed. This may not be as serious an issue as it at first appears, however; Campbell (2004:146-7) for instance, points out: “It is not so much that the comparative method 'assumes' no variation; rather, it is just that there is nothing built into the comparative method which would allow it to address variation directly....This assumption of uniformity is a reasonable idealization; it does no more damage to the understanding of the language than, say, modern reference grammars do which concentrate on a language's general structure, typically leaving out consideration of regional or social variation.” Subjectivity of the reconstruction
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