29. Genetic and typological classification of languages.

Genetic classification sets the similarity of languages on the ground of their common ancestor. Typological classification sets the similarity of languages regardless from their affinity (родства), by common signs. Genetic classification. By common ancestors languages divided into families, groups, subgroups and more little divisions. F.e. Uzbek language – Turkic group – Uigur subgroup – Altaic family. Russian language – Slavonic group – Eastern-Slavonic subgroup – Indo-European family – European branch. English language – Germanic group – Western-germanic subgroup – Indo-European family. Languages that possess genetic ties with one another belong to the same linguistic grouping, known as a language family. These ties are established through use of the comparative method of linguistic analysis, which relies mainly on shared phonological innovations as the test criteria. In linguistics, genetic relationship is the usual term for the relationship which exists between languages that are members of the same language family (Indo-European languages (Europe, Southwest to South Asia); Sino-Tibetan languages (East Asia); Niger-Congo languages (Sub-Saharan Africa); Afro-Asiatic languages (North Africa to Horn of Africa, Southwest Asia)). Two languages are considered to be genetically related if one is descended from the other or if both are descended from a common ancestor. For example, Italian is descended from Latin. Italian and Latin are therefore said to be genetically related. Spanish is also descended from Latin. Therefore, Spanish and Italian are genetically related. Contact with another language can result in influence by it. For example, English has been influenced by French, Persian has been influenced by Arabic, and Japanese has been influenced by Chinese. However, this influence by definition does not constitute a genetic relationship. The discipline of historical linguistics rests on the notion that almost all of the languages spoken in the world today can be grouped by derivation from common ancestral languages into a relatively small number of families. For example, English is related to other Indo-European languages and more specifically to the Germanic family (West Germanic branch), while Mandarin Chinese is related to many other Sino-Tibetan languages.

Typological classification (by Gumboldt (by morphological criteria)): analytic (isolating) languages: words consist of single morphemes; most words consist only of a root. Mandarin Chinese, Vietnamese, Cantonese, Cambodian. Agglutinating languages: words consist of a stem and one or more clearly identifiable affixes (Finnish, Hungarian, Estonian, Swahili, Turkish). Inflectional (fusional) languages: words consist of stem and affixes which often mark several grammatical categories simultaneously. Greek, Latin, Sanskrit, Russian. Polysynthetic languages: words consist of long strings of stems and affixes, which may translate as an entire English sentence. American Indian languages.

30. Common features of Indo-European languages. Common features of Germanic languages.

Common features of Indo-European languages (Albanian, Greek, Armenian, Asturian, Belorussian, Bulgarian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, French, German, Irish, Latin, Portuguese, Russian, Ukrainian) show itself in phonetics, lexicon and grammar. Phonetics: in ancient times there were long and short vowels, monophthongs and diphthongs, but in modern languages they reserved not everywhere. In Russian, f.e. there are not long and short sounds, diphthongs. In all Germanic languages (German, English) this rule now exists, in Romans as well. Indo-European languages had consonants of three types: voiceless, voiced and aspirate. Aspirate consonants remain in Indian and some of the Persian languages. Stress in all IE languages is dynamic (as in Russia). Moreover there is a melodic stress (the meaning of a word depend on the high of the stress). Also there is a numerical stress (stressed vowel become longer). Common grammatical features of IE languages: 1. All IE languages are inflectional; 2. All of them from the beginning had two genders: animate / inanimate (female, neutral). Then there was three genders. 3. There were 8 cases in ancient (the first 5 of them still use in Russian) + there were local (местный), deponent (отложительный), vocative (звательный), nominative (именительный). 4. There was a system of roots: all IE languages consisted of 3 parts: root, rootmaking (основообразующий) suffix, ending. Now we can see such rules in Russian (мать – матери, небо – небеса, время - времена). Common lexical features of IE languages: 1. Common name of relatives (брат); 2. Numerals from 1 to 100; 3. Stars, sun, moon and so on and natural phenomena; 4. Domestic animals; 5. Basic verbs (брать, стоять, лежать, сидеть, любить, лгать, жить, сеять); 6. Parts of the body.

The Germanic languages are a group of related languages that constitute a branch of the Indo-European (IE) language family. The common ancestor of all the languages comprising this branch is Proto-Germanic, spoken in approximately the mid-1st millennium BC in Iron Age northern Europe. Proto-Germanic, along with all of its descendants, is characterized by a number of unique linguistic features, most famously the consonant change. The most widely spoken Germanic languages are English and German. The group includes other major languages, such as Dutch and Afrikaans; and the North Germanic languages including Norwegian, Danish, Swedish, Icelandic. Germanic languages possess several unique features: the leveling of the Indo-European verbal system of tense and aspect into the present tense and the past tense (also called the preterite); a large class of verbs that use a dental suffix (/d/ or /t/) instead of vowel alternation (Indo-European ablaut) to indicate past tense; these are called the Germanic weak verbs; the remaining verbs with vowel ablaut are the Germanic strong verbs; the use of so-called strong and weak adjectives: different sets of inflectional endings for adjectives depending on the definiteness of the noun phrase; the consonant shift known as Grimm's Law (the consonants in High German have shifted farther yet by the High German consonant shift); a number of words with etymologies that are difficult to link to other Indo-European families, but variants of which appear in almost all Germanic languages; the shifting of stress accent onto the root of the stem and later to the first syllable of the word. Germanic languages differ from each other to a greater degree than do some other language families. Some, such as German, Dutch, and Icelandic have preserved much of the complex inflectional morphology inherited from the Proto-Indo-European language. Others, such as English, Swedish, and Afrikaans have moved toward a largely analytic type.