The Diachronic Typological Approach to Language

Abstract Modern typology, as distinct from the nineteenth-century morpho logical typology, arose in a structuralist milieu. It is not surprising, therefore, that in its earlier phases (e.g. Trubetzkoy 1939, Greenberg 196 3) it was essentially synchronic in outlook.1 It is also not surprising that the first application of modern typology in historical linguistics was not essentially concerned with change as such, the heart of diachrony, but rather based on the hypothesis that a reconstructed protolanguage should not violate the constraints of synchronic typology as deduced from contemporary languages or those of the past as attested from written records.