Gramatyka historyczna 09.11.2012

Typological (structural) classification of languages

1. Syntactic (according to word order)

   • Subject+verb+object (SVO)– most common like in English, Polish, French, Vietnamese

   • Most natural word order is taken into account

   • Verb+subject+object (VSO)– 3^rd common - Irish, classical Arabic, biblical Hebrew, Welsh

   • Celctic language family is the branch of IndoEuropean languages, and includes Irish, Welsh, another is Germanic, Italic (French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Romanian) – Slavonic – they belong to the same family, but have different structures. Historical relation doesn’t mean they are related syntactically. The closer they are historically the chances on similarities are bigger, but it doesn’t have to be the case !!

   • Subject+Object+Verb (SOV) - Turkish, Japanesse, Georgian, Korean – second most common

   • They are subject-object – it is more natural – it is more important who did some action, that to whom

   • Other are possible, but not common, rather exotic:

     1. OVS – Apalai, makusi (Brazil), barasano (Columbia)

     2. OSV – Apurina and Xavante, Jamadi (Brazil)

     3. VOS – Cakchiquel (Guatemala), Huave (Mexico), Tzotzil, Houailou

        • They are object-verb

2. Morphological – study of the structure of words

Kup-ił(Gender, tense, aspect, number, person), Książk-ę(number, case, gender) . So 4 morphemes

• Analytic, isolating: Chinese, French, Vietnamese

• Synthetic: - moprhemes are put all together

• Agglutinating, agglutinative: Turkish, Finnish, Japanese, Swahili

• Inflecting: Latin, Greek, Polish

• Incorporating, polysynthetic: eskimo, Aystralian languages – what you need to express in the whole sentence in Polish i.e., you need only one word.

• Infixing languages: Bontoc (the Philippines), Semitic languages – they use infixes like in Arabic, where vowels are placerd between consonants

• Gramaticcal morphemes represents several meanings at the same time

  • Turkish:

    • El ‘the hand’ – root morpheme

    • Elim ‘my hand’ – im

    • Eller ‘the hands’ – lerplural marker

    • Ellimde ‘ in my hand’

    • Ellerim ‘ my hands’

    • Ellerimde – ‘in my hands’

    • One to one correspondence between morpheme and meaning

  • Eskimo: illuminiippuq – He is in hos own house illu-, mi, niip, puq

• English is analytic language. Originally it was semi-inflectonal language (Germanic family), but now it changed to be analytic one. One of the most important development, it changed the whole structure

1. Genetic classification of languages

   • Historical linguistics – srtudy of language history and the way languages change

   • Comparative linguistics – deals with relations between languages

   • Comparative reconstruction – determines relations between languages. A way of systematically comparing series of languages. – looking for the common form – here it is probably f. Usually the majority win, but it is not always so easy, we have to know the mechanism. Very common change is f into v, or devoicing

LANG A	LANG B	LANG C	LANG D
Hono	Hono	Fono	Vono
Hari	Hari	Fari	Veli
Rahima	Rahima	Rafima	Levima
Hor	hor	for	vol

• Historical relations between languages – family relations

• Internal vs. external history of a language – we can study internal and external changes. The use of alphabet for instance is the example of external history, because it is an external influence – Christianisation had influence on this. Happened outside speakers themselves. All the borrowings resulting from some invasions etc. Changes within the speakers themselves are internal like most of the sound changes

• Dialect vs language

• Synchrony vs diachrony

NON-INDO EUROPEAN LANGUAGES