Our courses: Historical linguistics

A course in historical linguistics (comparative method) is rarely to never viewed as interdisciplinary and usually comes in one of the first years of the BA programme, which is understandable because this branch of linguistic knowledge was in fact the root from which all or most of modern linguistics burgeoned. Essentially, however, historical linguistics is a study of human history through linguistic data and should couple with such non-linguistic disciplines as archeology or human genetics. The course will introduce the methods of contemporary historical linguistics and its controversies (such as deep reconstruction or the status of contact languages) and provide case-studies in establishing genealogical relations and reconstructing protolanguages for different language families and branches. Understanding mechanisms of linguistic divergence and methods of describing correspondences between related languages, such as distinguishing between inherited lexicon and lexicon shared by horizontal spread, will be vital for research in areas of high linguistic density. This course will be complementary to that of contact linguistics and language convergence in the sociolinguistic block and will put the traditional comparative linguistics into a wider interdisciplinary context.