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Phonetics and Phonemics in Historical Linguistics-I
During the last few years the methods and techniques of descriptive linguistics are more frequently used in the historical study of languages. They are replacing the traditional methods of the neogrammarians which were so prevalent at the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century. The changes which have resulted from the use of the new methodology in the field of historical and comparative linguistics are on the whole beneficial and have brought greater precision and rigour than was known before. The phonemic theory, which was the earliest to develop fully in the descriptive field, has produced a radical change in the aims and procedure of reconstruction of the earlier stages of languages based on comparison.
It is now generally accepted that what matters in the history of a language is the phonemic change and not a mere phonetic change, which may or may not amount to phonemic change. It is possible that a phonemic change may occur in a language even when the phoneme shows no phonetic change affecting it. It is also agreed that when we compare two or more related languages, what we aim at and succeed in doing is a reconstruction of the phonemes and the phonetic system of the parent language or an earlier stage of the language studied, and not its exact phonetic makeup. In fact, it is quite possible to refer to the phonemes of the parent language with purely arbitrary symbols like x, y, or z, which would not commit us to any phonetic values to be assigned to them.
These are some of the essential ideas of the new approach to historical linguistics and being essentially true, the comparativist has to admit them whole-heartedly. But can the consideration of the phonetic values of the reconstructed phonemes be quite irrelevant to historical linguistics? Will it not be necessary for the historical linguist to try to ascertain their phonetic nature. with all the evidence available to him? This will depend on the nature and amount of evidence available and at best he will be able to reconstruct the phonetic values of the phonemes only approximately. This is generally con