The following list contains 50 terms of interest in historical linguistics. Your job is to give a brief definition for each term. Your definition should indicate how the word is used in linguistics, or as related to the history of English. We will do this assignment in class on Wednesday 16 December.
- Substrate
- Monophthongization
- Cognate
- Grimm's Law
- Phoneme
- Suprasegmental
- Phrase
- Clause
- Creole
- Pidgin
- Indo-European
- Chain shift
- Pronoun
- Preposition
- Gothic
- Great Vowel Shift
- Johnson's Dictionary
- Chancery English
- Metathesis
- Idiolect
- Euphemism
- Received Pronunciation
- Caxton
- Reflexive Pronoun
- Exeter Book
- Voice (of verbs)
- Mood (of verbs)
- Celtic languages
- Vernacular
- Natural language
- Authorized Version (of the Bible)
- Declension
- Conjugation
- Paleography
- Caedmon's Hymn
- Semantics
- Morphology
- Diachronic
- Synchronic
- Proto-language
- Strong verb
- Noah Webster
- Basque
- Sanskrit
- Isogloss
- Toponymy
- Digraph
- Front-mutation (in plurals)
- Metaphor
- Metonymy