Oriental languages and civilizations

The course aims at presenting the students with a general overview of the field of Historical Linguistics. The linguistic change will be analyzed in all the possible theoretical and methodological perspectives. The students, who has already acquired, during the first semester course in General Linguistics, the main concepts referring to the synchronic functioning of linguistic systems, will be now guided to the understanding of the main phenomena that distinguish linguistic change in the subsystems of semantics, lexicon, phonology and morphosyntax, through a rich exemplification of concrete cases taken from modern and classical European languages, as well as from ancient and modern Oriental languages. In the second part of the course the way in which the comparative-reconstructive method has been elaborated and the reasons why it is not equally applicable to any language will be illustrated. The goal is to ensure that the student reflects on the history and typology of the languages of the Far East that are studied in this degree program to evaluate on the one hand which general principles of change are exactly reflected in Japanese, Korean, Chinese, Persian, Arabic and Hindi and, on the other, what are the reasons why the comparative-reconstructive method is in fact inapplicable to the specific case of Japanese and Korean. The course also aims at refining the students' capacity to critically and comparatively revise the different opinions put forward by historical linguists over time regarding the main topics covered during the course. It is also assumed that the students will sharpen their ability to historicize linguistic thought and then make a conscious use of the bibliography that will be faced in the preparation of the degree thesis.