I’ll paraphrase Abraham Lincoln and say, “If you give me six hours to chop down a tree, I would spend four hours sharpening the ax.” That’s the ethos behind one of my top hobbies- dabbling in historical linguistics. I’ll explain later why I view it as the “four hours of sharpening” in the analogy. For now, I’ll just give a quick intro to what it is.
Historical linguistics is the study of how languages connect and relate to each other through time. Many laypersons don’t know this, but brilliant linguists have already conclusively reconstructed many dead mother languages that were never written down. With scientific rigor, they can figure out the sound changes* and semantic shifts** that lead accents to become dialects, and dialects to become mutually unintelligible*** languages.
*sound change- when one sound slowly starts to get articulated at a different location in the mouth, like old Germanic p slowly become pf in modern German.
**semantic shift- when one word’s meaning slowly changes over time, like how Latin fabulare (“to tell stories”) came to mean “to talk, speak” in most daughter languages. (Note, it also underwent very well understood sound changes, leading to Spanish hablar, Portuguese falar.)
***mutually unintelligible- when speakers of Language A cannot understand Language B, nor can B understand A. Interestingly there are language-pairs where this is not the case.
By studying historical linguistics, I exercise my brain and make it more malleable for learning actual grammar and vocabulary of current, useful languages. Quirky grammar rules are easily understood with a wider perspective given by historical linguistics. Sound change studies also make it so you can rapidly learn new vocabulary between related languages- like knowing that word-initial h of Spanish is highly likely to be a word-initial f in the related Portuguese word. Just a few weeks ago, I started correctly conjugating Portugese verbs just knowing these rules.
The fact is, if you’re the average internet user accessing the internet through English at this very moment- both English and your mother tongue sprung from the Indo-European family of languages. Ancient Indo-European was a language, never written, spoken by nomads who coincidentally have a likely homeland in Ukraine and/or Russia’s Krasnodar region several thousand years ago (though this is still in dispute.) By reconstructing early Latin, early Germanic, ancient Celtic, we’ve also been able to reach back and have very strong guesses on exactly how Indo-European words were pronounced. Sound changes are quite predictable and repeat the same patterns around the world, so it’s like a forensic reconstruction. Linguistics already have a list of thousands of Indo European roots reconstructed.
By knowing about this, while not particularly being fluent in it, I can make fast progress in most daughter languages of Indo-European. The family includes almost all languages spoken in Europe (minus Basque, Finnish, Hungarian, and Turkish) and ALSO includes Farsi/Iranian, Kurdish, Tajik, Hindi, and Urdu. Their grammars have of course shifted quite considerably but in the end, are transparently related.
A simple look at Ukrainian verb endings, and Spanish verb endings, will show this.
To conjugate a verb in Ukrainian, add : For Spanish, :
I ***–(y)u -o
You -(y)ash, -(y)esh -as, -es
He, she, it -(y)a, -(y)e -a, -e
We -(y)amo (y)emo -amos, -emos
You (more than one person) -(y)ate, (y)ete -ais*, -eis*
They -(y)ut, -(y)at -an, -en**
*-ais, -eis, comes from historic Latin –atis, -etis, and lost the t over time. Ukrainian lost the final s. The original Indo-European ending would’ve had all the features.
** The Indo-European ending for they had an –nt at the end…which is even what had survived into Latin as -ant and -ent. One language lost the t, one lost the n. The way this happens is so predictable that it lets you predict or understand vocabulary quite reliably. Latin centum /kentum/ became Spanish cien /siyen/, while ancient Slavic became sot. Interestingly, they both underwent a predictable change where k sounds before i or e vowels would erode to a palletized form of themselves, usually through transitory phases of being pronounced as ts. Sometimes a ts becomes a ch sound****, other times, it becomes s. Anyways…the whole point was to notice that the final -nt of the Indo-European followed its same old path in both granddaughter languages- losing the n in one, losing the t in the other.
*** (y) in parenthesis is to show it’s a y sound only introduced in certain situations- in Ukrainian, it’s added whenever the stem of verb ends in a vowel. This is a common need in many languages (to insert a y when a stem ends in a vowel and the following suffix also starts with one.)
****exactly what happened in Italian, whose cento is pronounced chento. And if you’re wondering if English hundred has anything to do with this- yes it does. Indo-European k shifted to kh, then h. The –red suffix meant “count,” like in how you still may say you’re buying a hundred count box of gloves, for example. A hunda-redh, a hundred count. Meaning that modern English hundred count is wildly redundant, like hund count count. Check here- Etymology Online
Even with thousands of years of semantic shift (where words change slightly in meaning over time, until the changes can be quite large), there are still thousands of transparently related words in the distant cousins of the family. As I learn Slavic languages, one that sticks out is a verb stem klad, which shows up in various words for putting, placing, setting things up. It is directly related through thousands of years to English clad, cladding, and probably clothing, cloth (something you’d put on yourself, of course.)
I can also apply generalized historical linguistics knowledge to make progress in non-Indo-European languages. Turkish grammar is extremely regular, and the only things to know to correctly apply the right word endings are basic linguistics principles. It’s also why I can have conversations with Azerbaijani people in a Polish refugee shelter and Kazakhs on a New York metro. You apply some predictable sound change rules to ancient Turkic, and you can fake your way through much of the Turkic world. I won’t go into a Turkish grammar rant now, but take my word for it! It also enables me to have perspective on various tough things like Mandarin tones, on how Korean spelling varies from Korean pronunciation, and other things like that.
Okay I can’t help myself- we’re gonna talk about Korean spelling. I can’t be arsed to render Korean characters so it’ll be a “trust me bro” kind of thing here. We’ll have to learn to understand some Latin/French to get this better.
In English, we have a bunch of borrowed words that follow this pattern-
Possible impossible
Practical impractical
Conceivable inconceivable
Literate illiterate
Reverent irreverent
Now…what do you see? There is a Latin suffix, handed to use via French, that historically was just a in- added to the front of the word. Over time, the -n came to change pronunciation under influence of the consonant that followed. In some cases it stayed an -n. Before b, p, and m, it shifted to m. In some cases, it doubled the length of the consonant following it, while disappearing. This happened before l and r. It also, interestingly, is still spelled n before a c or g, but most speakers are pronouncing it ng (think, ingconceivable!!).
In any case…as native speakers this is no big deal. In fact, for some of you, you’ve never really had to know these assimilation rules, you just learned this opposite pairs bit by bit and never thought of it. BUT- if you understand how widespread consonant assimilation is throughout global languages*, it’ll help you several times over, to know its principles. How does this connect to Korean spelling and pronunciation? Well- Korean is quite a phonetic language- what you see is what you say- except that it often has consonant assimilation when one root word ends with a consonant, while another root word also starts with a consonant. The first one assimilates to a point of articulation closer to where the second one is. What’s wild about Korean spelling is that they’ve emphasized keeping the root words clear and easy to discern- and you just have to learn the assimilation rules. It’s as if we still spelled like this-
Possible inpossible
Practical inpractical
Conceivable inconceivable
Literate inliterate
Reverent inreverent
..and just expected you to learn the assimilation rules for pronunciation. The human mind CAN certainly do this- it does so in many language systems around the world. It’s a choice with positives and negatives for each side. On one hand, as a learner of a language, or a scholar, transparently seeing your word roots is helpful- while on the other hand, having a language be as immediately phonetic as possible without having to memorize bespoke assimilation rules, lets you get better pronunciation or literacy far quicker- though you sacrifice depth of knowledge while increasing breadth.
*correctly using the Arabic word for the requires you to know consonant assimilation. It also gives you a more big-picturey understanding of Irish eclipsis (uru) as just another ole case of consonant assimilation, with quirky spelling rules.
This footnote actually makes another point- which is that the benefits of knowing some historical linguistics do NOT just apply to related or distantly related languages. The human brain has its ever-present molding effect on what kinds of changes happen. So much, in fact, that patterns repeat, even on opposite corners of the planet. So sometimes, strange-ass features will be shared between unrelated languages. Just an example- in both Irish and Turkish, you don’t add a plural suffix to the end of a noun if you’ve already got a specific number in front of it. Five dogs in both languages is rendered roughly as five dog.
You don’t quite know what’s going to help, when, but in the end, my point is that if you plan on learning even just one or two foreign languages to some very basic depth, the best favor you can do yourself is look into a few intro books on linguistics. There aren’t too many historical linguistics books meant for laypersons, but discussions of it are an inevitable part of any good introductory book. I got started with John McWhorter’s Power of Babbel many many years ago (at age 17 or so?) and kept digging. Merrit Ruhlen’s books also played a part.
Taking Abe Lincoln’s ratios not quite to heart, I’d still say you’d do well to spend just a year* geeking out on historical linguistics, if you wanted to be, say, a reasonably traveled person who learns the basics of two or more languages in your lifetime. If you’re convinced you’ll only ever learn one language- then that sharpening may not pay off, but in my view that’s a self-fulfilling prophecy anyway. Learning only one language, with no sharpening of the mind is like doing the one absolutely worst, hardest part to becoming a linguistically agile person but quitting at that first summit, after reaching it with no prep or gear.
*that’s not one academic year of majoring in linguistics. I just mean, you spend a bit of spare time over twelve months just buying a few books on the topic, following some Instagram creators who talk linguistics, bingeing some YouTube pop linguistics people, etc, before diving headlong into self-teaching a single random language to yourself.
The Wandering Farmer (an feirmeoir fánach) 
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