Cyclical language change

Cyclical language change is a theory from historical linguistics . It was set up in 1891 by the linguist Hans Georg Conon von der Gabelentz .

The model assumes that the individual human languages continuously go through a cycle in their development from the point of view of grammar and word structure. It is unclear whether the model actually applies, since the underlying time periods are longer than the language records go back. Overall, the language change is certainly more complicated than the model, since other effects such as contacts with other languages are superimposed on it.

This development basically describes the syntax of a language. According to the theory, agglutinating languages develop into inflected / fusional languages ( language typology ), these in turn develop into isolating languages , and these ultimately change into agglutinating languages; this closes a cycle. This model can be substantiated by comparing the development of various human languages; however, due to the very long periods of development, a complete cycle has not yet been observed.

The cycle arises from the fact that every person only partially absorbs his mother tongue and develops it further. He creates his own rules. The changes can be passed on. They usually happen in a certain direction. There is an urge to shorten, to simplify, which is in contradiction to the urge to make things understandable.

Von der Gabelentz (1901: 255ff.) Developed these ideas in a concise form under the heading "The spiral course of language history, the agglutination theory".

Stages of development

Agglutinating languages into inflecting languages

Agglutinating languages clarify contexts by adding morphemes , usually suffixes , to the individual words of a sentence . As a result, words can often consist of a very long series of suffixes.

Speakers of this type of language now tend to compress the long morphemes . Suffixes are grouped together, and the stem of the word can also react with the suffixes through sound changes.

After all, the language would have had an inflected linguistic structure. This change would have to z. B. in Finnish or Turkish and is also clearly identifiable in Finnish.

Inflectional languages into isolating languages

Inflectional languages express grammatical relationships through (strong) inflection and some suffixes.

One now tends to reduce the flexion more and more, and ultimately to reduce it very strongly. In order to compensate for the resulting lack of linguistic accuracy, on the one hand, many particles , such as prepositions, are introduced, see analytical language structure , on the other hand, the word order also gains greater importance, since the grammatical relationships are no longer recognizable from the sentence components themselves.

English has largely changed from an originally inflected language into an isolating language. While the word order in Germanic with its pronounced inflection was very free, today's English is characterized by a strict word sequence subject-predicate-object in most cases . Similar developments can be observed in other European languages. There was also a case loss in Latin .

Isolating Languages into Agglutinating Languages

Isolating languages express grammatical relationships through connecting words and word order.

Over time, the speakers begin to add the individual nouns and verbs and their auxiliary words together and finally use them as the only words. For example, verbs with a long sequence of suffixes are created, which include person, tense, etc. Ä. suggest.

Such a process can be observed in Chinese. For example, there are some nominal suffixes.

Examples

Change from analytical to synthetic structure

Secondary local case in Lithuanian:

Adessive , developed from the locative + postposition * pie ( tėviepi with father)
Allative , developed from the genitive + postposition * pie ( tėvopi to the father)

literature

Georg von der Gabelentz : Linguistics, its tasks, methods and previous results. With a study by Eugenio Coseriu, re-edited by Gunter Narr and Uwe Petersen. Tuebingen Contributions to Linguistics, Tuebingen 1972, DNB 579428931 . (Reprint of the 2nd enlarged and improved edition, edited by Albrecht Graf von der Schulenburg. Tauchnitz, Leipzig 1901; 1st edition. Leipzig 1891)

Sascha Bechmann: Language Change - Change of Meaning: An Introduction. UTB, Narr Francke Attempto, Tübingen 2016, ISBN 978-3-8252-4536-8