Project Arcturus: A Tool to Teach Historical Linguistics

AbstractSome knowledge of historical linguistics is expected of students of linguistics. This area presents a big challenge to most students of linguistics because of either a lack of sufficient practice or a lack of a solid foundation in phonology and phonetics. In order to alleviate this problem, a teaching tool was developed to assist in the practice of phonological and orthographical evolution since Indo-European until Present Day English. Previous tools were aimed mostly at comparison, such as LingPy (List, 2012) or Iberochange (Eastlack, 1977) and many are not functional today, such as PHONO (Hartman, 2003). Previous approaches geared specifically at teaching this subject were not found. The goal is not only to help in the acquisition of knowledge in historical linguistics, but also to foster scientific thought and to serve as a first approach towards scientific linguistic research. With this in mind, the tool can be used in two different ways: teachers can preset the rules that they want students to practice, or students can be instructed to deduce and create their own rules, and then simulate the evolution. The rules are defined in terms of patterns, such as whether changes took place in all vowels or only long vowels or in a student-defined group of characters/phonemes, in what period the change occurred, whether shifts were involved, whether there were exceptions, the phonetic/orthographic context in which the rule applies, etc. The tool is currently being improved towards dialect identification, and it can interact with large corpora of English dialectal writing. The program also makes use of statistical techniques to identify and suggest the most prominent features of English dialects, if provided with a sufficient number of texts corresponding to that dialect