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<Paper uid="C69-0901">
  <Title>AUTOMATIC SI~IATION OF HISTORICAL CHANGE</Title>
  <Section position="1" start_page="0" end_page="4" type="abstr">
    <SectionTitle>
AUTOMATIC SI~IATION OF HISTORICAL CHANGE
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> 0.0 Purpose. One of the principal reasons for studying the history of a language has been to explain the system of its modern reflex, the contemporary language. This has been especially true in attempting to deal with certain anomalies in the modern language.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> But the role, if appropriate, of utilizing information concerning diaehronie processes in a synchronic description is not a~ all i clear. Recent studies describing contemporary languages, based purely on synchronically motivated grounds, suggest a much more intimate relation between a synchronic grammar and what has been  previously posited as a dlachronic description of that language. The two major problems involved in historical studies have been the statement of the sound change (or, as this has been reinterpreted, the grammar change) and the relation of this change to other diachronic changes, that is, its relative chronology. A great deal of attention has been paid to the former but very little to the latter, whose significance has g-oatly increased  See, for example, Lightner, 1965 and Schaehter and Fromkin, 1968.  Since a naive native speaker of a language can not be ex~cte + know the history of his language, the reason for this rei~.ion may lie in the manner in which the rules were added to the grammars of his ancestors. It is hoped that the future results of this study will help to shed light on this relation by comparing them and their associated grammars with synchronic descriptions. due to recent results in generative grammar. One of the reasons for the lack of rigor in stating the relative chronology has probably been the large amounts of data required for input to the set of rules and the very large number of stages/rules which must be accounted for and the many permutations of these rules which should be tested. This lack of rigor, in turn, has made it very difficult to discuss coherently the historical development of a language.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> The purpose of this paper is to discuss certain limited aspects of historical language change and suggest the possible use of the computer in approaching their solution. The types of problems discussed are only phonological and include only those changes conditioned by phonetic environment and which do not require syntactic information (for example, the change of the Old Russian unstressed infinitive ending /t'i/ to /t'/).</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="3"> 1.0 Language change. The discovery or postulation of the history of a language has been approached by two rather well-known methods. These are the reconstruction of the parent language of a set of genetically related languages and the reconstruction of an older stage of a language given a later stage. Both assume that languages evolve, thst is, change (either gradually or abruptly) and that the relation of one language stage tothe other is that one preceded the other. By comparing these stages in the development of the same or related sister languages one can  therefore reconstruct or recover the parent or proto language from which it or its sister languages evolved.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="4"> The two problems or reconstruct lon -- the reconstruction of a parent language of related sister languages and the reconstruction of an earlier form of a single language -- have been approached by separate methods.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="5"> The problem of reconstructing the parent of a set of related sister languages has been formalized by the so-called comparative method. The comparative method assumea~ among other things and in a simplified version, that hF comparing sets of sounds occurring in the same positions of the same words in the sister languages one can reconstruct the sound from whi h these sister sounds evolved. (&amp;quot;Same position&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;same word&amp;quot; may be difficult to define in a particular case.) For example, the word for &amp;quot;three&amp;quot;  Since five of the six forms have some kind of voiceless, dental stop in word initial position and that the fricative in Gothic can be accounted for by a change particular to Gothic, the assumption is made that the parent language of these, Proto-lndo-European, had  a voiceless, dental stop symbolized by *t, and this fact is highlighted by arranging these correspondences in tabular form:</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="7"> Once the proto language has been reconstructed, the correspondences used in the reconstruction can be reinterpreted as the results of phonological changes, for example, Proto-lndo-European *t became t in Old Church Slavonic, or, as it is usually expressed PIE *t &gt; OCS t The problem of discovering an older stage of a language given only a later stage of that language is approached by examining certain alternations in the language at the later stage and from these postulate a proto form from which it could have evolved. The alternations in the later stagewhich are usually chosen are in the form of morphophonemic alternations, that is, phonemically differently shaped forms of the same morpheme. The assumption is made that these irregularities in the shape of one n and the same morpheme must have been conditi~d regularly so that by postulating one proto form and accounting for the change by a general rule, we have successfully reconstructed that form of the earlier language.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="8"> I The forms of the proto language reconstructed by the comparative method can be interpreted as a statement of the state of the art in reconstruction for that language family.</Paragraph>
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