Journal of Historical Linguistics - Volume 11, Issue 3, 2021

This paper extends the scope of application of the semantic map model to diachronic lexical semantics. Combining a quantitative approach to large-scale synchronic polysemy data with a qualitative evaluation of the diachronic material in two text languages, ancient Egyptian and ancient Greek, it shows that weighted diachronic semantic maps can capture informative generalizations about the organization of the lexicon and its reshaping over time. The general methodology developed in the paper is illustrated with a case study of the semantic extension of time-related lexemes. This case study shows that the blend of tools well established in linguistic typology with proven methods of historical linguistics enables a principled approach to long-standing questions in the fields of diachronic semasiology and onomasiology.

The sound change from Latin /f/ to Old Spanish and Gascon /h/ has often been attributed to stratal influence from Basque. The motivation would be that Old Basque lacked /f/, and instead had a phoneme /h/, with which bilingual speakers replaced it when speaking in Romance. However, this hypothesis presents several difficulties. Most importantly, Navarrese Romance preserves Latin /f/, and in Basque itself, /f/ is adapted as /b/ in loanwords from Latin and Romance, not as /h/. Here we will argue that Old Basque had neither /f/ nor /h/. Instead, modern Basque /h/ derives from older */χ/. Medieval data will play an important role in establishing this. This hypothesis explains a number of morphophonological alternations, as well as some puzzling aspects in the treatment of aspiration in Romance borrowings, and it also makes it more difficult to hold to the stratal hypothesis for the Romance change /f/ > /h/.

This paper examines the history of aspiration in Eastern Balochi and aims to posit the course of its development and the extent to which it can be said to be contrastive. It uses primary data obtained by the author directly from various locales and compares sets of these data with the secondary data available on Balochi from 19th and early 20th century material. I maintain that, historically, voiceless aspiration arose word-initially in Eastern Balochi, in the sounds /p t č k/, and spread from there to other positions. In the discussion of aspiration, literature on Balochi has seen the question of influence from the neighbouring Indo-Aryan languages as an important problem. In this paper it is argued that equally relevant to the issue are two other important historical phenomena: post-vocalic lenition of stops and affricates, and gemination, a widely found but less well explored feature of Balochi. Also observed in Eastern Balochi, but less frequently remarked upon, is the breathiness found in voiced stops and affricate, a feature hitherto understood to be restricted to a small lexicon borrowed from Indo-Aryan. Focusing on a large number of Eastern Balochi varieties rather than seeing it as a unified whole, I attempt to show that contrastive status of aspiration appears to be gradually developing in these varieties. Many processes are leading in this direction, such as degemination and fortition of fricatives; among these one important diagnostic for the ultimate status of aspiration, I propose, is the transposition of glottal fricative.

This empirical study focuses on the diachrony of adnominal genitives of proper names in (Early) New High German (17th to 19th centuries), e.g., Carls Haus vs. das Haus Carls ‘Carl’s house’. Starting from the observation that word order variation exists within the whole period investigated, the study identifies determining factors for this variation and weights them in a multifactorial model of word order variation and change, the first time this has been done for German. The focus is on formal factors such as syntactic complexity, a factor that increases in importance over the observed time span. The historical data allow not only the investigation of established formal parameters but also the identification of new factors such as the type of inflectional marker (due to genitive allomorphy in older stages of German). In addition to these formal factors, genitive semantics, pragmatic information status and genre are also taken into account. Explanations for the trend towards the postnominal position of complex adnominal genitives as well as the stability of bare name possessors in the prenominal position are discussed.