This is how linguists reconstruct dead languages and create family trees

A brief introduction to how linguists know how languages are related to one another.

I received a request for a newsletter on language families and phonology. Thank you for the challenge; I hope you enjoy it!

If you take a random word in English and you define it, there’s a pretty good chance that the etymology of the word comes from Latin. In fact, English has borrowed more words from Latin than any other language. So, why isn’t English part of the Romance¹ language family, along with languages, like French and Spanish?

That’s our topic for this week. We’re going to learn how linguists group languages into families².

Where did English come from?

English isn’t a Romance language. The reason why there are so many Latin words mainly has to do with language contact—when two languages interact with and influence each other. For example, in the time after the Norman Conquest (1066), many Latin words entered English through French, as French was used by upper classes in present-day England (overtime bilingualism grew, as did the number of French words in English).

When we talk about languages being related, we’re not talking about language contact. Instead, we’re talking about previous versions of the language.

English is a Germanic language. That means that at some time in the distant past what is now considered English was proto-Germanic. Overtime, proto-Germanic changed so much that it broke off into North Germanic, West Germanic, and East Germanic. English is part of West Germanic, which branches off into Anglo-Frisian, Old Dutch, and Old High German.

INCOMPLETE PIE tree. Imagine this, but with primary branches for Indo-Iranian, Hellenic, Celtic, and Balto-Slavic. This is just to show how English and Latin are distant relatives.

So, English isn’t a child of Latin, like the Romance languages. English and the Romance languages are, however, distantly related. That’s because they’re both a part of the Indo European language family—a family that includes languages as fast East as India (e.g. Bengali, Hindi, Urdu Gujarati) and includes most of the languages in Europe³.

In other words, if you trace back far enough, languages ranging from Sanskrit to Swedish come from a single source—proto-Indo European (PIE).

The job of philologists is to trace back languages in hopes of reconstructing proto-languages, like PIE. The problem is that proto languages weren’t written, so philologists rely on later languages that were written and try to move backwards from there. One way they move backwards is through phonology.

A phonology interlude

When tracing back languages to see how they’re related, one of the main patterns philologists look for is consistent, regular sound changes (when a sound in language A consistently changes to the same other sound in language B in the same phonological environment) between cognates⁴ in languages.

An example of a regular sound change exists between German and English cognates: where there’s a /w/ in English, there’s a /v/ in the same place in German.

For this cognate, /w/ is changing to /v/ in the same position: word initial followed by /aI/.

For example, the word white has /w/ as the first sound in English; the same word in German, weiss, has a /v/ as the first sound. It’s the same deal with wonderful—pronounced in English with a /w/—and wunderbar—pronounced in German with a /v/.

For cognates, this pattern is extremely consistent. And speakers of these languages always pronounce these words the same way. An English speaker would never slip up and pronounce wild as /vaild/ (or /paild/, or any other random sound.)

Regular sound changes are key to linguistic reconstruction because if you know the regular rule for how a cognate will change between languages, then you have a good idea of what the word in the other language will be.

So, if there’s a cognate for wine between English and German, I can predict that the English word will start with a /w/ sound and the German word will start with a /v/ sound. I would then try to find evidence for my hypothesis by finding these words in the written form.⁵

Grimm’s Law

In 1822, Jakob Grimm⁶ recorded the First Germanic Sound Shift, which later became known as Grimm’s Law. Grimm’s Law is key to reconstructing PIE because Grimm realized that certain PIE consonant sounds regularly changed in Germanic languages, whereas they didn’t in Latin or Greek.

For example, whereas historically PIE had words with the /p/ sound, they overtime changed to the /f/ sound in the same position in Germanic languages.

Here’s an abridged table of Grimm’s Law:

PIE to Germanic. Since neither language (PIE or proto-Germanic) has written records, an asterisk (*) is placed before the sound to show that it hasn’t been attested in writing. Note: this is not a complete list of Grimm’s Law.

This table looks really different for Germanic languages compared to Latin and Greek, which seem to have had fewer sound changes from PIE.

PIE to Latin/Greek.

What these charts tell us is that where there’s a cognate between Latin and a Germanic language, like English, the words will look similar, but the sounds will change according to the patterns in the table.

For example, look at these pairings of English (left) and Latin (right) cognates:

• father - pater

• thin - tenuis

• heart - cord (pronounced with /k/)

• teeth - dent

They’re the same words just with sound changes.

English has a Germanic structure, but is filled with Latin borrowings, so we have tons of words that mean the same thing, but that look (and sound) slightly different.

• We call dads fathers, but the genetic test to see if it’s really your dad is called a paternity test.

• Thin arguments can be called tenuous.

• If your heart stops, it has gone into cardiac arrest.

• To help our teeth, we go to the dentist.

These pairings can give us an idea of which language the word came into English from. Paternity, tenuous, cardiac, and dentist all have Latin roots, while father, thin, heart, and teeth have Germanic roots.

We could use Grimm’s law and what we know about sound changes to hypothesize that the PIE root for father will start with a /p/.

More than sound change

Sounds give philologists great clues to work with. But they don’t only rely on sounds. They also look at the most common words, like numbers and family terms—since these types of words are not likely borrowed from other languages—and compare them across languages. Take a look at brother in Sanskrit and English:

English Sanskrit

brother bhrātr

This actually follows Grimm’s Law which accounted for /bh/ → /b/ sound change from PIE to Germanic.

They also look for similarities in structure; they look for irregular verb changes, for example. Look at these examples of languages that have the same singular and plural umlaut phenomena (regular sound change):

English German Swedish Norwegian

sing. man Mann man mann

pl. men Männer män menn

The single versus plural in these languages look very different from the Spanish hombre-hombres or the French homme-hommes. That’s because English, German, Swedish and Norwegian are more closely related.

Discussion

I hope this gave you an introduction to philology and language families. Please let me know by replying to this email or in the comments below:

1. What language family do the languages you speak belong to? If you don’t know, look them up!

Works Cited

For understanding Grimm’s Law and historical linguistics, in general, I used Jackson Crawford’s Youtube channel. I highly recommend this video for an introduction to how PIE broke off into different languages. I also liked this video on Grimm’s Law.

For general background information, I used the book Languages in the World (Tetel-Andresen & Carter, 2014).

1. The Romance languages are derived from Latin. They include French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, and Romanian.

2. Language genealogy uses the same words as a family: parents, cousins, grandparents. Picture it the same way as a family tree. You and your cousins don’t have the same parents, but you have the same grandparents.

3. But there are many other language families in Europe, like Uralic, which includes Finnish and Hungarian, among other languages.

4. Cognates are words that look similar and mean the same thing in two languages (because they come from the same root). The English page and the Spanish página would be an example. They mean the same thing and they sound quite similar. They both come from the Latin root pangere.

5. This is important: having found a regular sound change, I can now predict what words are in other languages. I then use written texts to see if I’m correct. In philology, if no written texts contain the word, then the hypothesized word is written with an asterisk in front to show it hasn’t been attested.

6. If the name sounds familiar, yes, he is one-half of the Grimm brothers, the men who collected German fairytales.