TOEFL Listening Practice: Lecture12

So! If you’re analysing languages, comparing and contrasting them, you might notice they have quite a bit in common. Perhaps they share some words and meanings. Perhaps they have certain endings that get the same treatment when the subject is past-tense. There must be some reasons why languages had so much in common. Maybe it happened by chance, maybe one language was heavily influenced by borrowed words from another.
In the 18th century, scholars studying Sanskrit, Latin and Greek noticed there were similarities between the ancient languages. The languages, upon further study, were so similar that they had to have come from the same source! That revelation ended up being a huge change in the study of languages. Linguists now refer to that base, ‘mother’ language as Proto-Indo-European.

Proto-Indo-European is a reconstructed language. In other words, scholars cobbled it together, based on the common roots of the three ‘child’ languages, and the similarities they have in pronunciation, grammar, sentence structure and many other things. They applied their newfound knowledge about languages in reference to other spoken dialects, and lo and behold, many languages spoken all over the world can trace their genetics back to that single thousand-year-old language.

Now, since we’re talking about languages in terms of genetics and ancestry, lets shift a bit and frame it like a family tree.

The tree model starts at the trunk with the mother language, the original one that started it all. Over time, it branches off into new child languages, which then branch off into child languages of their own. This went on and on until we are left with the linguistic state of the current world, with many different-but-similar languages spoken all over the world.

Two languages that share the same mother are called ‘sister’ languages. They end up sharing a lot of characteristics. For example, think of Italian and Spanish. Both have a strong Latin root, and they have many similarities in pronunciation, grammar and even vocabulary.

Now, the tree model is a convenient way of representing the development of a language family and of showing how closely related two or more languages are. Of course, this model has its errors, but it’s a nice tool to get the concept down.

So! One issue with this model is that it leaves a lot of information out. It is obviously way too simplified to have a whole language represented by just one branch on a tree especially taking into account the variations within that language, like technical use versus casual use, or regional dialects within the same language. For example, Spanish spoken in Spain is very different than the Spanish spoken in Mexico, after all.

Another issue with this model is that languages do evolve slowly and gradually. It isn’t necessarily a sudden branching off, but a nebulous shift in one direction while another section of the population branches off in another direction. There is no exact time when a mother language clearly breaks off into two child languages.

Okay! We will talk about this model more next week. When you have time before the next class, find some examples in media of the differences between types of English. While it’s still classified as a dialect, some linguists theorize English will soon be the mother language of a few children – especially focused between American-British and Australian dialects. The first two are similar enough that the natives can understand each other well enough, but Australia is starting to go so heavy-handed with slang and new words that travelers native to American English may have to struggle to keep up.