Historical Linguistics

"Historical linguistics is a historical discipline, and the writing up of hypotheses about past states of languages in the form of etymologies and diachronic grammars, it is a type of historiography." (Lass 1997:17).

Two distinct tendencies are commonly known in the practice of etymology, the dialectic one – which informs the work of any given practitioner investigating a given problem, and the “Neo-grammarian” tendency which favors a narrow encirclement of the object of study, limiting the explanatory apparatus as much as possible to law-like regularities of language change. However, there is another approach known as “Schuchardtian,” which favors a broadening of the hermeneutic circle to include not only linguistic, but also cultural, social, historical and other types of information.

In short, this post is based in another article, that investigated about the changes in language that have occurred through out the history of mankind, and do some research on the changes undergone in the historiography field, related with etymology and grammar. 

 

As some of us know, the origins of the historical linguistics discipline go back to ancient times, and this is also true of etymology, which is the study of words origin, that has been practiced at least since Plato’s time. But now, etymology is the reconstruction of the history (and prehistory) of words and word elements. 

The modern English word water, for example, goes back to Old English woeter. From there, specialists take it back to a putative antecedent watar, the common ancestor of water, High German Wasser and other Germanic cognates. Germanic watar is itself but one of several descendants of the more remote ancestor wed-/wod-/ud-, whence Greek hyd. or Russian voda.

We  see how language through out history has been modified, we see that it changes and develop with time, for is not constant. It is molded after each sitiuation of society, for it  runs  and changes to meet the needs of human communication in the linguistic context.

Chapter 3 by Dairo Luis Madariaga
Complemented by Giselle Bautista Garcia.