Historical Linguistics and Dialectology: A Case Study of Taiwan  

Oleh:

Peng, Fred C. C.

Jenis: Article from Journal - ilmiah internasional
Dalam koleksi: Language Sciences (Full Text) vol. 13 no. 3-4 (1991), page 317-333.
Fulltext: 13_03-04_Peng_01.pdf (973.74KB)

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Perpustakaan PKBB Nomor Panggil: 405/LAS/c Non-tandon: tidak ada Tandon: 1

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When linguists at least in Japan speak of dialectology, they have in mind two tasks: (1) the task of investigating the various dialects of a given language; and (2) the task of drawing atlases to show the distributions of the dialects in respect to certain linguistic elements. In the former, the dialects investigated can be scattered over a geographic area as wide as a country or a region within a country with two dialects, for instance, divided by a river or a mountain; in the latter, the linguistic elements include pronunciations, lexical items, grammatical variations, and meaning differences of the language in those dialects. Seldom do they think of the relationships between dialectology and historical linguistics. The reason is because, historically speaking, when dialectology was imported into Japan as early as the beginning of this century, only the two tasks just mentioned were imitated, forgetting entirely that the fundamental issues behind the birth of dialectology in the early nineteenth century were those that were at the heart of historical linguistics. Thus, very little has been done in Japan that makes use of the data collected in dialectology ‘for the purpose of historical linguistics, which deals with sound change, language change, and reconstruction. In this article, however, I shall demonstrate that there is a close relationship between historical linguistics and dialectology and that the tasks of dialectoiogists do not stop at the making of linguistic atlases but must go beyond those tasks to reconstruct the proto-forms. For instance, the word I$? ‘character’ is pronounced as gi, ji, and 1; which also correspond systematically to the pronunciations of ‘the sun’ as in g&tin, j&tin and l&~In ‘Japan’. While it is important to draw a map to show these distributions geographically, the reconstruction of the prom-forms of gz j< and l;as well as gh, jl!r, and l;t is also very important. It is concluded that both historical linguistics and dialectology are needed if the true pictures of the linguistic history of any one language or of a language family are expected by linguists and dialectologists.

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