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Etymology studies the history of words: when they entered a language, from what source, and how their form and meaning have changed over time. Words may enter a language in several ways, including being borrowed as loanwords from another language, being derived by combining pre-existing elements in the language, by a hybrid known as phono ...
Over enough time, changes in a language can accumulate to such an extent that it is no longer recognizable as the same language. For instance, modern English is the result of centuries of language change applying to Old English, even though modern English is extremely divergent from Old English in grammar, vocabulary, and pronunciation. The two ...
The distribution of languages has changed substantially over time. Major regional languages like Elamite, Sogdian, Koine Greek, or Nahuatl in ancient, post-classical and early modern times have been overtaken by others due to changing balance of power, conflict and migration. The relative status of languages has also changed, as with the ...
Language shift, also known as language transfer, language replacement or language assimilation, is the process whereby a speech community shifts to a different language, usually over an extended period of time.
Metonymy: Change based on nearness in space or time, e.g., jaw "cheek" → "mandible". Synecdoche: Change based on whole-part relation. The convention of using capital cities to represent countries or their governments is an example of this. Hyperbole: Change from weaker to stronger meaning, e.g., kill "torment" → "slaughter"
Diachronically (i.e. looking at changes over time), clines represent a natural path along which forms or words change over time. However, synchronically (i.e. looking at a single point in time), clines can be seen as an arrangement of forms along imaginary lines, with at one end a 'fuller' or lexical form and at the other a more 'reduced' or ...
Noam Chomsky spearheaded the debate on the faculty of language as a cognitive by-product, or spandrel. As a linguist, rather than an evolutionary biologist, his theoretical emphasis was on the infinite capacity of speech and speaking: there are a fixed number of words, but there is an infinite combination of the words. [3]
In linguistics, a conservative form, variety, or feature of a language is one that has changed relatively little across the language's history, or which is relatively resistant to change. It is the opposite of innovative , innovating , or advanced forms, varieties, or features, which have undergone relatively larger or more recent changes.