Journal of Historical Linguistics - Volume 1, Issue 2, 2011

The article focuses on the roles of Greek, Latin/Romance and Arabic in the onomastics of Northeastern Sicily between the 11th and 13th centuries. The first part deals with landless peasants from four villages at the turn of the 11th and 12th centuries. I argue that the role played by Arabic in the nomenclature of these communities was more important than has previously been suggested and the role of Romance speakers may have been minimal. The important role of Arabic is interpreted as a consequence of a situation of linguistic dominance and borrowing of word-forms. In the second part, I analyze the onomastics of the free population of northeastern Sicily attested in charters during the 12th and 13th centuries. I argue that the 13th century was the crucial period when Greek lost its initially high prestige. This is visible in both first names and second name elements. In first names, Greek speakers started to accommodate their nomenclature to their surroundings, dominated by Romance languages and the church of Rome, which meant that both language shift and religious conversion played a role. The second name elements in Greek were seldom transferred to the name stock of the Romance-speaking population. I argue that the role of the city of Messina, in which monolingual Romance communities were evidently formed, was important in this process. When such a community was formed in Messina, the Greek language was marginalized fairly rapidly even in northeastern Sicily, where it had had an important position. However, some surnames with a Greek or Arabic etymology survived in the local name stock until the present. I explain this by referring to the role of the de-semanticization of such name elements. This consists both of the semantic bleaching of the original significance of the names and of the neutralization of their linguistic connotations.

This study describes and explains the paradox of related languages in contact that show signs of both linguistic divergence and convergence. Seventeen distinct languages are spoken in the northernmost islands of Vanuatu. These closely related Oceanic languages have evolved from an earlier dialect network, by progressive diversification. Innovations affecting word forms — mostly sound change and lexical replacement — have usually spread only short distances across the network; their accumulation over time has resulted in linguistic fragmentation, as each spatially-anchored community developed its own distinctive vocabulary. However, while languages follow a strong tendency to diverge in the form of their words, they also exhibit a high degree of isomorphism in their linguistic structures, and in the organization of their grammars and lexicons. This structural homogeneity, typically manifested by the perfect translatability of constructions across languages, reflects the traditions of mutual contact and multilingualism which these small communities have followed throughout their history. While word forms are perceived as emblematic of place and diffuse to smaller social circles, linguistic structures are left free to diffuse across much broader networks. Ultimately, the effects of divergence and convergence are the end result, over time, of these two distinct forms of horizontal diffusion.

This paper examines the diachronic origin of a vowel split in the Bantu language Hungan. It is shown that the inherited Proto-Bantu seven-vowel (7V) system was first reduced to a classical five-vowel (5V) system before the Kipuka variety of Hungan developed a new kind of 7V system. Such a 7V>5V>7V cycle has never before been described in Bantu. The new 7V system is thus the end product of a vowel merger and a vowel split which succeeded each other, but it could be mistaken for the outcome of a chain shift. The vowel split itself started out as an internally-motivated allophonic variation between tense and lax mid vowels that subsequently became phonologized through an externally-motivated loss of the conditioning environment. It can therefore be considered as a contact-induced language-internal change.

Change affects different parts of the lexicon and grammar differently, and in particular some parts are more time-stable than others. The creation of family names from words of other classes is an example, and many such examples need to be examined before credible generalizations can be made about differential time stability in historical linguistics. In German, the language used here for illustration, family names typically derive from common nouns or adjectives designating the origin, place of residence, occupation, or salient personal characteristics of the families or their heads originally given those names. Despite such origins in nouns or adjectives, and despite retaining the phonology and partly also the syntax of their origins, family names in contemporary German have subtly, but comprehensively, severed ties with their ancestral word classes in their morphology upon attaining name status. This is shown for inflection as well as derivation, and this result renders the traditional word class categorization of family names as a type of noun in languages such as German untenable. Diachronic conclusions are drawn on this basis as to the transience of semantics-pragmatics and morphology on the one hand and the pertinacity of syntax and phonology on the other in category-changing developments of this kind, with other kinds of developments apparently showing different kinds of developmental dynamics.