diachronic, synchronic

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	"Carl Hempel's celebrated essay "The Function of General Laws in History" is typical. By trying to "dechronologize" diachronic historical accounts into synchronic "social-science" propositions"

diachronic [dy‐ă‐kron‐ik], relating to historical change over a span of time. The revolution in linguistics begun by Ferdinand de Saussure in the Cours de linguistique générale (1915) is founded partly on the distinction between the diachronic study of linguistic features evolving in time and the synchronic study of a language as a complete system operating at a given moment. Saussure argued, against the historical bias of 19th‐century philology, that the synchronic dimension or ‘axis’ must be given precedence.


synchronic [sin‐kron‐ik], concerned only with the state of something at a given time, rather than with its historical development. In modern linguistics, the synchronic study of language as it is has generally been preferred to the diachronic study of changes in language that dominated the concerns of 19th‐century philology.