Families of languages

Families of languages

• First attempt to discover the history of world’s languages was made in 18. century

• Scholars began to compare groups of languages in systematic way, to see a correspondences between them

• It could be assumed that the languages were related – they developer from a common source, even though this might no longer exist

• Evidence of common origin for groups of languages can be seen in romance languages – Latin is the „parent language“ of French, Spanish and Italian („daughter languages“)

• Proto-Indo-European language is said to be parent languages to Latin, Greek, Sanskrit

• Term „family“ is used as a general term for any group of languages where there is an evidence of a close relationship

• When there is no evidence, the groups are called phylum

The Comparative method

• In historical linguistics it is a ways of systematically comparing series of languages in order to prove a historical relationship between them

• Scholars begin by identifying similatirites and differences between the languages, and trying to reconstruct the earlier stage of development from they could have derived

• Cognate = two languages, that has been shown to have a common ancestor

Types of linguistic classification

1. Genetic (genealogical) classification

• Based on the assumption that languages have diverged from a common ancestor

• It uses written remains as evidence, or deduction

1. Typological classification

• Based on a comparison of the formal similarities which exist between languages

• Attempt to group languages into structural types, on the basis of phonology, grammar or vocabulary

• It does not look at historical relationship

• For example – how many vowels they have, whether they use clicks

• Language can also be classified whether their word order is fixed or free

Types of languages:

1. Isolating, analytic or root languages

• All the words are invariable – there are no endings

• Grammatical relationship are shown through the use of word order

• They are made up of sequences of free morphemes – each word consists of a single morpheme

• It does not use prefixes or suffixes to compose words, they are just used like separate words

1. Inflecting, synthetic languages

• Grammatical relationship are expressed by changing the structure of the words – using inflectional endings

• Affixes or bound morphemes are attached to other morphemes – so that a word may be made up of several meaningful elements

• Stem = part of the word to which affixes are added, it may consist of one or more morphemes

1. Agglutinative of agglutinating languages

• Words are built up out of a long sequence of units with each unit expressing a grammatical meaning

• Ha:z-unk-ban (house-our-in) = in our house (Hungarian)

• Swahili use prefixes to indicate the person of the subject ni-na-soma (I-present-read) = I am reading

• One suffix or so usually convey only one meaning

1. Fusional languages

• Subtype of synthetic language, words are formed by adding bound morphemes to stems, just as in agglutinating languages, but here the affixes may not be easy to separate from the stem

• Spanish – suffixes are attached to the verb stem to indicate the person and number (hablo – I am speaking, habla – he is speaking, hablé – I spoke)

• Single affix may convey several meanings

• Russian, Czech