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Historical linguistics, also known as diachronic linguistics, is the scientific study of how languages change over time. [1] It seeks to understand the nature and causes of linguistic change and to trace the evolution of languages.
The highly diverse Nilo-Saharan languages, first proposed as a family by Joseph Greenberg in 1963 might have originated in the Upper Paleolithic. [1] Given the presence of a tripartite number system in modern Nilo-Saharan languages, linguist N.A. Blench inferred a noun classifier in the proto-language, distributed based on water courses in the Sahara during the "wet period" of the Neolithic ...
The origin of language, its relationship with human evolution, and its consequences have been subjects of study for centuries.Scholars wishing to study the origins of language draw inferences from evidence such as the fossil record, archaeological evidence, contemporary language diversity, studies of language acquisition, and comparisons between human language and systems of animal ...
A unique combination of features defines a phoneme. Examples of phonemic or distinctive features are: [+/- voice], [+/- ATR] (binary features) and [ CORONAL] (a unary feature; also a place feature). Surface representations can be expressed as the result of rules acting on the features of the underlying representation. These rules are formulated ...
Language change is the process of alteration in the features of a single language, or of languages in general, over time. It is studied in several subfields of linguistics : historical linguistics , sociolinguistics , and evolutionary linguistics .
In linguistics, language classification is the grouping of related languages into the same category. There are two main kinds of language classification: genealogical and typological classification. There are two main kinds of language classification: genealogical and typological classification.
Linguistics is the scientific study of language. [1] [2] [3] The areas of linguistic analysis are syntax (rules governing the structure of sentences), semantics (meaning), morphology (structure of words), phonetics (speech sounds and equivalent gestures in sign languages), phonology (the abstract sound system of a particular language, and analogous systems of sign languages), and pragmatics ...
An attested word from which a root in the proto-language is reconstructed is a reflex. More generally, a reflex is the known derivative of an earlier form, which may be either attested or reconstructed. A reflex that is predictable from the reconstructed history of the language is a 'regular' reflex. Reflexes of the same source are cognates.