change

Historical change is properly an area of comparative and historical linguistics or what is more commonly called comparative philology which is an attempt to reconstruct the history of languages and via their history to relate languages apparently  coming fromm  acommon source  or ancestor.one of the aims of the subject is to establish sound laws to show for instance the correlation of p in Romance languages with f in Germanic languages and this called  Grimm`s Law.This can be illustrated  in English where pairs of words come from Romancee and Germanic ,e.g,paternal/father;pen/feather;piscatorial/fish.But the establisment of sound laws depend on knowing that the words we compare are the same in the sense that they can be supposed to have acommon originand this can only be done on the basis of their meaning .We can find find words that ought by the sound laaws to be related and then look for raesonable semantic relationships.Unhappily this is not possible with all groups of languages.In many parts of the world the language relationsips are difficultto establish largely becuase we have no ancient records.Thus speculation may take over.
Apart from the scientific study of the change of meaning ,it is an obvious fact that people are interested in Etymology,the discovery of earlier meanings of words.Indeed dictionaries attempt to satisfy this interest by quoting at lleast the most recent origin of each word.Part of the difficultyaa for the layman is that words are often not what they seem.Gooseberry has nothing to do with geese and strawberry is not directly connected with the use of straw to protect the fruit.The chief difficulty is that there can be no  true or original meaning since hman languages stretch back to far.It is tempting to say that nice rally means precise as in nice distinction.But a study of its hiistory shows that it once means silly and earlier  it must have bneen related to ne"not"and sc- probabably meaning "cut"as in scissorsand shears.To solve the problem of etymology linguists come to accept the distinction made explicit by de Saussure between diachronic and synchronic linguistics the first being concerned with language through time ,the second with language as it is or as it was at a particular time.Although there some theoretical problems about drawing drawing a clear line between these two types of study ,iin practice it can be drawn and a great deal of confusion can be avoidedif we clearwhether a linguistic statement is a synchronic or diachronic one.Linguists have in recent years concentrated on the synchronic study of language.This study must logically precede the diachronic  study for we can not study change i alanguage  until  we have first established what the language was like at the time during which it changed.So, in semantics we cannot deal with change of meaning until we know what meaning is.aa