Week 1

Introduction. Words and their histories.

What is etymology. Revealing some interesting etymological connections (lord, sad, friar).

A brief history of historical-comparative linguistics.

Plato. Middle Ages. The founders of historical linguistics. 20th century.

Required readings:

Reader 8-14.

Week 2

Languages of the world.

Indo-European languages and their classification. Other language families.

Required readings: Reader 14-23. Barber 58-87.

Language change.

Internal and external development. Reconstruction of the primitive languages. The historical comparative method.

Required readings: Reader 23-27. Campbell 125-136.

Week 3

Sound change.

Regular changes. Germanic consonant shift and English Great vowel shift. Sporadic changes. The cause of sound changes.

Required readings: Reader 27-30. Campbell 16-49

Irregular formal changes

Analogy and its types, reanalysis, contamination

Required readings: Reader 30-34. Campbell 103-113, 117-121

Week 4

Folk etymology.

Discussion of the term. Conditions. Examples. The types of FE.

Required readings: Reader 34-38, Campbell 114-116.

Word-formation (derivation, composition)

About the suffixes. Backformation. Compound names. Opaque compounds.

Required readings: Reader 38-41, Campbell 116-117.

Week 5

Semantic change.

The types of semantic change. Broadening, narrowing, pejoration, amelioration and a shift of the meaning.

Required readings: Reader 41-45, Campbell 252-256, 260-262

Metaphor and metonymy

Definitions of the terms. Metaphors in the language. Metonyms and synecdoches.

Required readings: Reader 45-47, Campbell 256-260.

Week 6

Words as evidence of social, cultural and technological changes.

Examples of technological change - motorization. What we can learn about old technologies and customs from today’s words.

Required readings: Reader 47-49, Campbell 266-268.

Linguistic taboo.

The primitive taboo. Sacral taboo. Convention. The ways of taboo replacement. Political correctness.

Required readings: Reader 49-53, Campbell 262-264.

Week 7

Midterm test.

How we call neighbors

Ethnonyms - given by peoples themselves and given by neighbors. Ethnic names meaning ‘giants’, ‘sodomites’ etc..

Required readings: Reader 53-56

Week 8

The words of imitative (onomatopoeic) origin

Words imitating sounds - differences in languages. Bird names. Grouping of imitative words. Nursery words.

Required readings: Reader 56-60, Campbell 353-355.

Language contact I

Substrate, superstrate, adstrate. Old English and Celtic. Latin influence.

Required readings: Reader 60-63, Barber 98-107, Vachek I 73-75.

Week 9

Language contact II

Scandinavian influence. Norman conquest and influence. English and American Indian languages.

Required readings: Reader 63-68, Barber 127-136, 145-150, Vachek II 74-76.

Borrowings.

Motivation for the borrowing. Cultural words. Chain borrowings. Multiple borrowings.

Required readings: Reader 68-73, Campbell 62-82

Week 10

Czech words in the world.

Hussite weapons. The story of "dollar". Polka, robot and others.

Required readings: Reader 73-76

English influence on Czech and other languages.

Influence of English and other languages on Czech. Orthographic and morphological adaptation. Communicative spheres with English borrowings.

Required readings: Reader 76-79.

Week 11

Proper names and their "deproprialization".

Special character of proper names. Common nouns from personal names, place-names etc.

Required readings: Reader 79-81, Campbell 273-274

Etymological curiosities

Coincidental resemblance. Some unexpected etymological equations. Incidental names.

Required readings: Reader 81-83.

Week 12

Indo-European linguistic prehistory.

What we can learn from the language - thinking, religion, technology, social structure, etc.

Required readings: Reader 83-85

Final test.

Week 13

Discussion to the essays, course wrap-up