Reflect on the history of your target language. To what language family does it belong? What sounds, words, and structures exemplify periods of contact with other cultures? How do these considerations enhance your understanding of the target language and culture in terms of their associated historical origin, development, and contemporary realization? and pragmatic questions of usage? How do languages change over time? How do linguists track, predict, and extrapolate these changes?
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The Italian language, or lingua italiana, descended from the Vulgar Latin of the Roman Empire. One interesting fact is that it has many inputs from other languages like Greek as the Roman Empire went on and conquered abundant part of Europe. It is a Romance language of Indo-European language family. It has 34 spoken Italian dialects as the official language of Italy is Italian, it's not widely known that the country boasts some 34 spoken languages and related. During the Middle Ages, Latin was one of the few established languages in Europe, though the great majority of people were illiterate, and only a handful were well versed in the language.the language that turned out to be Italian actually originated and developed in central Tuscany and became formal in early 14th century through the works of Tuscan writer Dante Alighiery who wrote thins in native Florentine which later gained prestige due to its political and cultural significance and became the foundation of the official Italian language. Progressively, it replaced Latin and became the official language.
By taking into these considerations, I can focus more on how regional differences make up the various word formation rules and cultural difference.
Dutch is a west germanic language. According to Britannica, it is derived from the speech of the Western Franks, but was altered through contact with speakers of "North Sea Germanic." Dutch varies heavily based on dialect, but many agree that it is one of the closest germanic languages to english. Dutch and english share many cognates and loanwords. Unlike English, Dutch is a gendered language, but it does not have a case system. Most citizens of the Netherlands speak english fluently.
I find it very interesting to learn about how languages progress and change over time. Many languages become unique due to geographical isolation, and many grow to have similarities due to extended contact between civilizations over time. One example that comes to mind is the similarities between Tagalog and Spanish after the Spanish colonized the Philippines.
Korean belongs to the Altaic language family along with Japanese. However, surprisingly Korean and Japanese are grouped in the same language family, but Chinese is not. Chinese belong to the Sino-Tibetan language family but not grouped with Korean nor Japanese even though their language system is quite similar to that of each other. However, I do have to note on the Altaic language family in Wikipedia it does have in parenthesis “Sometimes included” for Korean and Japanese. The Altaic family language grouping have been controversial, and this idea is rejected from other linguist because the languages within the group (i.e. Turkic, Mongolic, and Tungusic languages) occupy a large range on the globe. Therefore, the languages may diverge and differ greatly. On the website’s map, the Altaic language family covers much of eastern Europe to north Asia but not including China. Therefore, many linguists reject the inclusion of Korean and Japanese into this language family because the range at where these Altaic languages cover too much of the Eastern hemisphere.
Those that support the inclusion of Korean in the Altaic language family argue that the similarities in history, sounds, and grammar qualify Korean to be part of the family. For an example, a snowstorm in Korean is “noobora”. In Mongolian, it is “boro’an” and in Yakut, it is “Burxa-n”. Additionally, Korean sentence structure follows SOV (subject-object-verb) agreement so does Mongolian and Turkic languages. Therefore, linguists that support Korean’s inclusion in the Altaic language family is based off these arguments.
Moroccan Arabic is a form of Arabic and thus is a Semitic language belonging to the Afro-Asiatic family of languages. However, unlike Modern Standard Arabic and other forms of Arabic emerging on the Arabian Peninsula, Moroccan Arabic is arguably a creole, a resulting mixture of contact between Arabs, Amazigh, French, and Spanish peoples. The majority of the basic sounds in Moroccan Arabic are borrowed from MSA, but it also makes use of English/French sounds which were not present in MSA (“g,” “ch,” “v,” and “p”). However, despite the strong Arabic influence in phonetics, Moroccan Arabic phonology is characterized by a collapse of short vowels, which is a feature of the Amazigh languages. Additionally, Moroccan Arabic’s vocab attests to its diverse history. While the language contains many Arabic words (rajəl: “man,” kəlb: “dog,” etc.), it also contains Amazigh words (Muš: “cat,” xizzu: “carrots,” Lalla: “lady”); French-inspired words (forshita: “fork,” tilifūn: “telephone,” tabla: “table”); and Spanish-inspired words (kuzina: “kitchen,” l'banio: “toilet,” playa: “beach”).
The vocab, phonetics, and phonology of Moroccan Arabic thus point to the history of cultural exchange in Morocco and, unfortunately, show the effects of invasion (Arabic) and colonialism (French and Spanish). Yet, while some have tried to erase these histories through further “Arabizing” or “Amazigh-ing” the language, most Moroccans happily use and integrate the French and Spanish terms in their vocab despite the history of colonialism. They are proud of their language and its vast differences from MSA and other dialects, which is why they continue to bring in new English, French, or Spanish terms into the language to this day. Pragmatically, this makes Moroccan Arabic a difficult language. Unlike MSA which follows a strict structure and allows all words to be traced back to basic “roots,” Moroccan Arabic is a hodgepodge of different words which do not relate to each other because they were taken from different languages, and even, language families. Therefore, while my experience learning Latin in the past and general familiarity with French and Spanish will aid my learning of Moroccan Arabic vocab, I will have to adjust to a “liberal” language lacking a strict grammatical system like MSA.
Languages are merely many dialects which develop and change, sometimes into different languages entirely. Also, sometimes they encounter other languages/dialects, cross-breeding in the same language family or mixing with a language from an entirely different family, producing pidgins and sometimes creoles. Unfortunately, too, many languages die or even become extinct in this process. Historical/Comparative linguists track linguistic change over time through the comparative method and internal reconstruction, often aiming for linguistic reconstruction – as the comparison of cognates and noncognates and computation of a language tree from this information by Dr. Atkinson and his colleagues showed.
Portuguese is a Romance language, which are modern languages that evolved from Vulgar Latin between the third and eighth centuries. Originated in the Iberian Peninsula of Europe. It is the sole official language of Portugal, Angola, Mozambique, Guinea-Bissau, Cape Verde, São Tomé and Príncipe, and Brazil, while having co-official language status in East Timor, Equatorial Guinea, and Macau.
Portuguese is part of the Ibero-Romance group that evolved from several dialects of Vulgar Latin in the medieval Kingdom of Galicia and the County of Portugal, and has kept some Celtic phonology in its lexicon.
Here can be seen the similarity of some words coming from romance languages, when comparing portuguese to italian words: macarrão ('pasta'), piloto ('pilot'), carroça ('carriage'), and barraca('barrack'), from Italian maccherone, pilota, carrozza, and baracca. As seen the similarity is clear.
The phonology is similar to those of languages such as Catalan and Franco-Provençal, whereas that of Spanish, which is similar to those of Sardinian and the Southern Italian dialects. Some would describe the phonology of Portuguese as a blend of Spanish, Gallo-Romance (e.g. French) and the languages of northern Italy.
Another remarkable aspect of the grammar of Portuguese is the verb. Morphologically, more verbal inflections from classical Latin have been preserved by Portuguese than by any other major Romance language. Portuguese and Spanish share very similar grammar, but portuguese has some characteristics that make it different, as for example the use of the future subjunctive mood, which developed from medieval West Iberian Romance, while In modern Spanish it has almost entirely fallen into disuse (Se eu for eleito presidente, mudarei a lei. If I am elected president, I will change the law).
According to this, the historical origin of portuguese and my native spanish language are from the same language family and share many characteristics, what enhance and favours my learning process a lot. Language is always changing. We've seen that language changes across space and across social group. Language also varies across time.
Generation by generation, pronunciations evolve, new words are borrowed or invented, the meaning of old words drifts, and morphology develops or decays. The rate of change varies, but whether the changes are faster or slower, they build up until the "mother tongue" becomes arbitrarily distant and different.
All aspects of language change, and a great deal is know about general mechanisms and historical details of changes at all levels of linguistic analysis. However, a special and conspicuous success has been achieved in modeling changes in phonological systems, traditionally called sound change.
In the cases where we have access to several historical stages -- for instance, the development of the modern Romance Languages from Latin -- these sound changes are remarkably regular. To predict a pandemic is not easy, and the same occurs with the change in language. It is difficult to foresee how a language is going to evolve.
When accompanied by splits of populations, language change begin with dialect divergence. Over longer time periods, we see the emergence of separate languages as in the contemporary Romance languages, separated by about 2000 years, and the Germanic languages, whose divergence began perhaps 500 years earlier. Most linguists agree that our methods for tracking and reconstructipn will take as only as far back as about 5000 - 7000 years; after that, the number of cognate sets available for reconstruction becomes just too low to give results that can be reliably distinguished from chance relationships.
reference:
https://www.ling.upenn.edu/courses/Fall_2003/ling001/language_chang...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portuguese_language