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- Science that began in the 18th and 19th century.
- Defined as the Scientific Study of language change over time.
- Practitioners identified relationships among languages and show how they fit into "family trees" (Example: Romance Languages)
- These language genealogies often point back to ancestral languages that went extinct. What we have now are derivations of the original language

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- Languages are dynamic, meaning that they are constantly changing.
- Syntax and Pronunciation aren't the only language systems that change over time.
- GRAMMAR can significantly change and by doing so alter our daily speech.
- As an example, English used to be spoken with the verb at the end of the sentence.
- Thou used to be used in replacing you.

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- When comparing Old English such as plays written by Shakespeare and Modern English used today, there are vast differences.
- We can still understand the meaning of the Old English but now we have become more efficient in our speech.
- Consider terms like "Facebook" and "Netflix," these are new terms that have significance in our daily lives but language had to change to recgonize these terms. Shakespeare wouldn't know what Facebook is because it wasn't required of their linguistic performance.

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- Obviously language has changed over time otherwise we would all be speaking the language that humans originally developed in Africa.
- When people moved to new places and had new environments their vernacular had to adapt to those new environments.
- This led to the development of Chinese and their tones, African's using clicks, and then some native American languages pack a lot of information into one or few words.

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- When we consider Latin a dead language, we are focusing on the written language.
- That is because spoken Latin was technically just an early stage of the romance languages.
- Latin transformed over time into the new forms of French, Spanish, and Italian, which we still actively use in many countries.
- These progressions are slow in practice and take many generations - there was never just a day where people went to bed speaking Latin and woke up speaking Italian.
- Speech changes every day (as mentioned before languages are dynamic) and we are already contributing to the next stage of our language by adding slang and new terms like I-phone and Google.

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To summarize:
- Historical Linguistics is the study of why languages change over time.
- Languages are dynamic and change in many aspects including: Syntax, Pronunciation, and Grammar.
- Old English has changed drastically - Shakespeare is credited with the invention of over 1,700 English words we still use today.
- Language had to change as humans changed their environments.
- Language changes progress slowly and over long periods of time. We have new terms constantly being added to English as well as words being scrapped