Definitions

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

  • noun Diachronic arrangement or analysis.
  • noun Change occurring over time.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • noun The study of change over time, especially changes to language

from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.

  • noun the study of linguistic change

Etymologies

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition

[diachron(ic) + –y.]

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Examples

  • For kicks, I might be tempted to overlap it with my own chronology of Pre-IE to create a detailed overview of Indo-European diachrony.

    A precise chronology of Proto-Indo-European 2009

  • For kicks, I might be tempted to overlap it with my own chronology of Pre-IE to create a detailed overview of Indo-European diachrony.

    Archive 2009-03-01 2009

  • In M. Degraff (Ed.), Language Creation and Language Change: Creolization, diachrony, and development. (pp. 1-46).

    Innateness and Language Cowie, Fiona 2008

  • As you can see it has a few variants but this is not really due to dialect so much as diachrony.

    Archive 2007-06-01 2007

  • As you can see it has a few variants but this is not really due to dialect so much as diachrony.

    Latin 'pulcher': Is it really an Etruscan loan? 2007

  • Seems to me that typology and diachrony are totally conflated by that study, as reported.

    languagehat.com: LINKING LANGUAGES. 2005

  • An insistence on diachrony is sweet music to this Indo-Europeanist manqué.

    languagehat.com: THE STORY OF PU. 2005

  • It is my contention that the most illuminating way of regarding the functional diffusion of pu — and of any content word — is by looking, not only at one synchronic distribution (that of Standard Modern Greek), but at the full range of synchronic distributions in the sundry diatopic variants (dialects) of Modern Greek, and that such a discussion must be informed by the diachrony of the form...

    languagehat.com: THE STORY OF PU. 2005

  • A complete diachrony could only be achieved by comparing not only isolated facts, like sounds, but the whole state of the language at one period with that prevailing at another.

    STUDY OF LANGUAGE ALVAR ELLEG 1968

  • The reason why this was possible lay in the fact that the gap between synchrony and diachrony (history) remained to be bridged: it was not clear just how the physical description of speech sounds related to the entities which had somehow come to be represented in the (syllabic or) alphabetic records in which the various well-studied literary languages were recorded.

    LINGUISTICS HENRY M. HOENIGSWALD 1968

Comments

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  • JM is phenomenally interested in diachrony and wishes he had more time to devote to it.

    April 14, 2011