The course will introduce you to the concepts and methodologies of historical and comparative linguistics. Historical linguistics is the study of how and why language change over time (i.e., diachronic linguistics) and it is also the study of how languages are classified into families (i.e., comparative linguistics, language typology). These two areas are closely entwined and are usually taken to constitute a single field of study.
Each class begins with a themed lecture followed by a practice session where we review examples of different types of language change and practice the comparative method and other techniques for doing linguistic reconstruction. We will particularly focus on the language changes in two language families – Indo-European and Austronesian.