The materials presented below were developed for a 400-level undergraduate overview of Historical Linguistics which I taught at the University of Arizona in Fall of 2017.
Note: This class was structured using Campbell 2013 and Trask 2013 as rough guides. Though the materials are presented in a different order, and some materials not mentioned by either book are covered here, several lectures were based on material found in these books.
Lesson 2: Written Language I (Mesopotamia)
Lesson 3: Written Language II (The Alphabet and East Asia)
Lesson 4: Written Language III (Central & South America)
Lesson 5: Phonetics Review Day
Lesson 6: Externally-Motivated Lexical Change
Lesson 7: Internally-Motivated Lexical Change I: Lexical Innovation
Lesson 8: Internally-Motivated Lexical Change II: Semantic Change
Lesson 9: Establishing a Genetic Relationship
Lesson 10: Genetic Relationships
Lesson 11: Dialectology and Language Formation
Lesson 12: Models of Language Change and Regularity
Lesson 13: Unconditioned Sound Change & Writing Unconditioned Rules
Lesson 14: Conditioned Sound Change I
Lesson 15: Conditioned Sound Change II
Lesson 16: Chronological Ordering
Lesson 17: Effects on the System
Lesson 18: Types of Sound Change I
Lesson 19: Types of Sound Change II
Lesson 20: Proto-Indo-European to Old English
Lesson 21: The Great English Vowel Shift!
Lesson 22: Modern English Sound Changes and Dialect Formation
Lesson 23: The Comparative Method
Lesson 24: Comparative Reconstruction I
Lesson 25: Comparative Reconstruction II
Lesson 26: Distant Genetic Relationships
Lesson 27: Statistical Methods in Historical Linguistics
Lesson 28: Final Presentations
Lesson 28: Conclusion
Licensing Statement: All instructional resources on this site are being released under a Creative Commons 2.0 BY-NC license, so you should feel free to use them or remix them, with attribution, if you're preparing your own class!