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A natural language exists only in human society, in which it functions primarily as a means of communication. The history of a language is closely connected with the history of the society which it serves. The language development is a historical process and like all historical processes is time dimentional.

The history of each language includes two sides of its development: extemal and intemal. The extemal history deals with the circumstances in which a language community has been existing - its territorial changes, contacts with the other communities and therefore language expansion or disappearance, mutal linguistic influences (e.g. loans), etc. Together with the development of a language in time, changes may appear in its own system, changes which take place gradually and unconsciously on the one hand, but on the other hand changes which the community gets used to and accepts. These changes create the intemal history of a language.

When we examine a set of languages with numeral resemblances both in lexicon and grammatical structures, the reason for these resemblances is explained by language history. Exceptionally (unfortunately), there is only one case in linguistics, where the explanation is doubtless - the Romance languages all of which are modem forms of Latin, their ancestor well-known from written sources. Usually in all other cases we assume that the examined languages are genetically related, i.e. that they stem from primarily one ancestral language and that they now appear as its modem forms. “In the history of each language family three basie periods may be distinguished. The first one covers a relatively uniform development of a proto-language on a smali area which is its proto-craddle. In the course of the second period the area of the proto-language ąuickly enlarges due to territorial expansion and at the same time begins to differentiate into dialects. During the third period the communicative unity of the proto-language disappears and the separate dialects, existing already in the second period, become separate languages, wich form in the course of time their own literary forms” MILEWSKI (1968). This scheme of developement may be reliably followed when we have linguistic sources of greater time depth, like e.g. 01d-Church-Slavonic or Old English (“old” means the oldest written form of a language). But if we deal with languages recorded only in their modem shapes, an extremely important problem should be kept in mind : “A la longue cependant, des langues parentes finissent par differer tant que leur communaute d’origine devient impossible a reconnaitre. Si par exemple on n’avait que le franęais, le bulgare et rarmenien modemes pour representer le groupe indo-europćen, il ne serait pas aise d’etablir la parente de ces trois langues, et Ton ne pourrait songer a en poser la grammaire comparee. II suffit d’operer avec ces memes langues, mais considerees sous des formes de quelques centaines d’annees plus anciennes, a savoir le latin, le vieux slave des premieres traductions et rarmenien classique, pour la parente devienne evidente et pour qu’on puisse poser les principes essentiels d’une grammaire comparee de ces trois langues. La parente de deux langues peut