Last edition winners
-
1
Exploring Variation and Change in the Distant Past
Rodrigo Hernáiz
This article explores the potential of analysing language variation and change in written records dating back to the earliest stages of the time period conventionally termed ‘historical’. In particular, it considers the suitability of Old Babylonian data, a Semitic language from the early II millennium BCE, as object of historical sociolinguistic investigation. A case study focuses on the representation of sibilants in texts from a relatively extensive corpus of letters. Its analysis is framed within the scope of testing the temporal limits of variationist approaches to language change and its uniformitarian premises. The study offers detailed linguistic insights from textual documentation going back nearly four thousand years, a period in which most languages spoken at that time remain undocumented (i.e., are ‘prehistorical’), and can only be inferred or reconstructed.