Were Stone-Age languages really more complex than their modern counterparts? Was Basque actually once spoken over all of Western Europe? Were Welsh-speaking slaves truly responsible for the loss of English morphology? This latest collection of Peter Trudgill's most seminal articles explores these questions and more. Focused around the theme of sociolinguistics and language change across deep historical millennia (the Palaeolithic era to the Early Middle Ages), the essays explore topics in historical linguistics, dialectology, sociolinguistics, language change, linguistic typology, geolinguistics, and language contact phenomena. Each paper is fully updated for this volume, and includes linking commentaries and summaries, for easy cross-reference. This collection will be indispensable to academic specialists and graduate students with an interest in the sociolinguistic aspects of historical linguistics.
Author(s): Peter Trudgill
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Year: 2020
Language: English
Pages: viii+164
Millennia of Language Change: Sociolinguistic Studies in Deep Historical Linguistics
Contents
Acknowledgements
Prologue: the Long View
1 Prehistoric Sociolinguistics and the Uniformitarian Hypothesis: What Were Stone-Age Languages Like?
Introduction
Caution-Inducing Features
Linguistic Features Due to Arbitrary Human Invention
Linguistic Features Due to Non-Anonymity
Linguistic Features Due to Non-Optimality
Linguistic Features Due to Dense Social Networks
Linguistic Features Due to Communally Shared Information
Conclusion
2 From Ancient Greek to Comanche: on Many Millennia of Complexification
Case Study: Dutch
Explanations
Simplification and Complexification
Complexity Development
The Sociolinguistic Matrix
Answers
Hospitality to Complexity Development
The Influence of the Social Matrix
3 First-Millennium England: a Tale of Two Copulas
Latin-Celtic Contact in Lowland England
Brittonic Celtic and Old English
Latin and Brittonic
Welsh, Nordic and English
4 The First Three Thousand Years: Contact in Prehistoric and Early Historic English
The Prehistory
West Germanic–Continental Celtic Contact
English–Insular Celtic Contact: the Early Period
English–Insular Celtic Contact: the Later Period
English–Old Norse Contact
English–French Contact
Conclusion
5 Verner’s Law, Germanic Dialects and the English Dialect ‘Default Singulars’
History
Maintenance of the S/R-Alternation
R-Generalisation
A Pan-Germanic Perspective
R-Generalisation in English Dialects
Conclusion
6 Deep into the Pacific: the Austronesian Migrations and the Linguistic Consequences of Isolation
Phoneme Inventories
Possible Sociolinguistic Explanations
Contact and Isolation
Community Size and Network Structure
Contact Again
Conclusion
7 The Hellenistic Koiné 320 BC to 550 AD and Its Medieval and Early Modern Congeners
Two Fallacies
The First Koiné
Colonial Arabic
Colonial Norse: Icelandic
Colonial German: the Ostkolonisation
Colonial English I: Ireland
The Iberian Reconquest
A Reconquista: Galician/Portuguese
La Reconquista: Spanish
La Reconquesta: Catalan
Colonial Russian
Colonial Spanish: Latin America
Colonial Portuguese: Brazil
Colonial French I: Canada
Colonial English II: North America
Colonial English III: Australia
Colonial English IV: South Africa
Colonial English V: New Zealand
Colonial French II: New Caledonia
Colonial Japanese
Transplanted Polish
The Hellenistic Koiné
Behavioural Coordination
8 Indo-European Feminines: Contact, Diffusion and Gender Loss around the North Sea
Bergen
I Contact
Copenhagen
Afrikaans/Dutch/Flemish
High German
II Diffusion
The Linguistics
The Geography
English
III Contact and Diffusion: Bergen Again
Sources
References
Index
