Tvrtko Samardzija | University of Zagreb, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences [Filozofski fakultet] (original) (raw)
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To understand language, we must take into account everything that makes it what it is, and to kno... more To understand language, we must take into account everything that makes it what it is, and to know its development means to know its entire history, the hows and whys of its current state. Much like a grown human’s vernacular, we must consider crucial every single event in the language’s entire history and discover its effect on language. In this sense, the article’s aim will be to show what it means to make a diachronic study. To present how it is done, the words 'window', 'fight', and 'hound' will be used for a short sample study, to show a key element in diachronic language study, etymology. The words have been chosen due to the amount of change they went through, being each an example for the three possible ways of change: lexical, semantic, and dual. Each example will show, in detail, how drastic changes through time on a word may be, even though some seem subtle. These examples will also show how tightly historical events and language changes are intertwined, and even how seemingly unrelated historical facts may be directly or indirectly linked to one of the changes a word or language has gone through. Finally, the author's personal theory based on an unorthodox point of view on language is presented in the latter part of the article.
To understand language, we must take into account everything that makes it what it is, and to kno... more To understand language, we must take into account everything that makes it what it is, and to know its development means to know its entire history, the hows and whys of its current state. Much like a grown human’s vernacular, we must consider crucial every single event in the language’s entire history and discover its effect on language. In this sense, the article’s aim will be to show what it means to make a diachronic study. To present how it is done, the words 'window', 'fight', and 'hound' will be used for a short sample study, to show a key element in diachronic language study, etymology. The words have been chosen due to the amount of change they went through, being each an example for the three possible ways of change: lexical, semantic, and dual. Each example will show, in detail, how drastic changes through time on a word may be, even though some seem subtle. These examples will also show how tightly historical events and language changes are intertwined, and even how seemingly unrelated historical facts may be directly or indirectly linked to one of the changes a word or language has gone through. Finally, the author's personal theory based on an unorthodox point of view on language is presented in the latter part of the article.