Historical Linguistics: An Introduction

by Winfred P. Lehmann

Historical Linguistics provides a comprehensive and clearly written introduction to historical linguistic theory and methods. Since its first publication in 1962 the book has established itself as core reading for students of linguistics. This edition has been thoroughly revised. Drawing on recent linguistic and archaeological research Professor Lehmann incorporates key developments in the field. These include exciting advances in the history and development of writing: and in typological classification which allows better understanding of the structure of early languages. Well-illustrated with Indo-European examples, and supplementary exercises which draw on data from other language families as well, the book will enable students to carry out independent work in historical studies on any language family, as well as up-to-date work in Indo-European.

Genres: Linguistics, Language, Nonfiction, History

364 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1962

About the author

Winfred P. Lehmann, historical linguist, served as the director of the Linguistics Research Center, University of Texas at Austin. Master's degree from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1938 and his Ph.D. from the same institution in 1941. He began teaching at UT-Austin in 1949 and has been professor emeritus since 1986.
An important contribution was his Proto-Indo-European Syntax, the first and one of the few existing treatments of Proto-Indo-European syntax in a generative framework.

In 1979 he published an updated version of Schleicher's fable together with Ladislav Zgusta.

Reviews

[Christopher · Rating 4 out of 5]

HISTORICAL LINGUISTICS: An Introduction is a textbook for university undergraduates written by Winfred Lehmann, one of the most illustrious Indo-Europeanists of the 20th century and an engaging writer. It is a real textbook, not just a dry handbook, for it is slow and friendly, and there are exercises at the end of each section to help the student apply what he has just learned. As Lehmann is an Indo-Europeanist, and most students reading this will be Westerners (although I ironically bought my copy in Beijing) the language family used for most examples is Indo-European. However, other families, such as Afro-Asiatic and Sino-Tibetan, are described.

If it's Winfred Lehmann writing the book, one can expect especial focus on several matters often given lesser attention by his peers in the field. Lehmann believes students should have not only an idea of what is believed about matters today, but that they should also understand the breakthroughs and personalities of the last two centuries. As a result, there is an ample history of historical linguistic study. Lehmann was also one of the first Westerners to appreciate the ties made by Soviet scholars between historical linguistics and typology, and so typological classification is covered as a necessary part of reaching a finer historical reconstruction. And finally, as Lehmann looked greatly at PIE syntax when most other people were concerned with other matters of reconstruction, there's a detailed chapter on syntactical change.

Lehmann's textbook is not perfect. Some things are idiosyncratic, such as his suggestion that the Praenestine Fibula inscription is authentic in spite of majority opinion against it. It also has competition for students planning on pursuing historical linguistics with Indo-European. If you already have a fairly decent idea of historicaly linguistics and are itching to discover the history of comparative Indo-European linguistics, you might as well go straight to Lehmann's THEORETICAL BASES OF INDO-EUROPEAN LINGUISTICS. If you still don't know much about historical linguistics but want to know what is believed right now in IE studies, there's also Fortson's INDO-EUROPEAN LANGUAGE AND CULTURE.

Beginning students in linguistics need all the materials they can get. Lehmann's HISTORICAL LINGUISTICS is a book worth seeking out, among others.

[Mesut Bostancı · Rating 5 out of 5]

I often daydream about linguistics. Between making little discoveries of the vast borrowings between Persian, Arabic, Turkish and Urdu, and inventing my own language, I can spend the entire subway ride in the morning just thinking about how a truly solipsistic morphology would look in the verbs of a language which was only ever spoken in the first person. I have a passing understanding of linguistics, so this book was the perfect manual (liber manualis) for thinking about how the different scales and structures of a language interact and influence each other. The book works through various combinations of four levels of language : phonology, morphology, syntax and semantics, as I guess all linguistics does (news to me). It then uses colorful examples from World literature, and when I mean World literature I mean it in the way Bilge Karasu does "Literature is...the memory of language. I am not saying the memory of individuals, it's the memory of language.", to explain what the hell it's talking about.
It's the world and time wide jaunt to the Behistan inscriptions in Iran, to vikings writing on bones, to stuck up brahmins, to Akkadian slang. In one of the best passages, it talks about how both the family tree diagram and the venn diagram conceptualizations of language interrelationships are both wholly inadequate to show the complexity of their situations. A relic of when a language had object verb order gets lodged in a haughty adverb, norsemen get lazy with terminal vowels and lose the Indo-European heritage of a verb, the word Rhyme, from Rim, gets a weird spelling from the thinking of an erroneous folk etymology that it is related to rhythm. The vast continental sediment of human thought has the very language I am writing in produced from celtic place names, norman legal terms, Scandanavian pronouns, and Hindustani quirks.
The book is getting to me. I did not find many examples of the interaction of Arabic, Turkish, and Persian, but I can now call those things by their scientific name when I come across them. In my Arabic class I keep pointing out how the lack of voiced labio-velar approximant leads to much more recognizable forms when words were adopted into Turkish. Qahwah to Kahveh, baqlawa to baklava. Now I understand that the adoption of the Arabic verb for to guess "khamman" and to repair "3ammir" had their verbal nouns attached to make compound verbs in Persian and Turkish: tahmin etmek/ tahmin zadan and tamir etmek/ tamir kardan, and that this was a perfect example of morphological adaptation in borrowing. I want to stop time so that I can make a dictionary that compares semantic changes through borrowing where the meanings are extended from Arabic to Persian and Urdu. (since when does فیصلہ mean decision?!)
It also helped to reinforce the truth that even though I may think ways of speaking or ideologies about speaking are somehow unique in being contemporary, wincing when I hear "he be like crazy yo" or thinking that our language is devolving thanks to moronic pop culture, in fact this is the normal life cycle of our species of language on the colorful coral reef (how sad that climate change is taking that metaphor away from us) of language.
As I invent my own language, and think of better ways to express things, or more logical ways to use morphological derivation to add to its lexicon, I can see older traces of the "original" language underneath the form, even though it's only a few years old. It is a constant rewriting of a draft of a draft of a draft. It is a controlled experiment in historical linguistics. Although since it's never spoken it doesn't have to deal with phonological issues, or other people's input ;)

[Thom Dunn · Rating 4 out of 5]

A Dick Bauerle assigned text.

[Bill Groce]

This was my textbook for the graduate course in Historical Linguistics at Univ of Texas Arlington. Very insightful.

[Fayaz]

Its good to be here as student and chase some knowledge..