How Language Changes—Building New Material

Language change is not only sound erosion and morphing but also the building of new words and constructions. This often happens through grammaticalization, where a word that begins as a concrete one (dog, eat, red) becomes one that serves the grammar, placing sentences in time (soon), specifying objects (the), and so on. The French negative marker pas began as the concrete word for step. The conjugational endings in Romance languages (Spanish hablo, hablas, habla) began as separate words. Languages also build new words from combining or refashioning old ones.

I. Even if sounds not only wear away but change, if even the ones that are changing can get worn away too, then why doesn’t a language just collapse into dust after a while? The answer is that at all times, a language is developing new material at the same time that it is losing it.