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Historical Linguistics

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11 domain-specific abstractions whose origin domain is Historical Linguistics.

  • Analogical change — Language change in which a form or meaning is remodeled after a perceived pattern elsewhere in the linguistic system.
  • Combinatorial method (linguistics) — A contextual method for inferring an undeciphered language’s word classes, meanings, and grammar without a known relative or large bilingual corpus.
  • Historical glottometry — A quantitative non-tree method for historical language subgrouping that measures overlapping innovations to reconstruct entangled genealogies in dialect continua and linkages.
  • Lexical diffusion — A model of sound change in which a phonetic innovation may be abrupt within a word but spreads gradually through the set of eligible lexical items.
  • Quantitative comparative linguistics — The use of explicit numerical, statistical and computational methods to compare languages, infer relationships, estimate change and test historical-linguistic hypotheses.
  • Quantitative metathesis — A historical sound change in which adjacent vowels exchange phonological length—classically Ancient Greek long-short sequences becoming short-long while segment order remains fixed.
  • Reborrowing — A lexical process in which a form borrowed into another language later returns to its source language with altered form, meaning or usage.
  • Rebracketing — A historical linguistic change in which speakers reinterpret the boundary structure of a form into a different sequence of morphemes or words.
  • Semitism (linguistics) — A linguistic feature in a non-Semitic text or language attributed to influence from a Semitic source language.
  • Sound change — A diachronic alteration in a language’s phonetic realization or phonological inventory and patterning.
  • Wave model — A historical-linguistic model in which innovations diffuse outward through overlapping speech communities, producing intersecting feature distributions rather than a single branching genealogy.