Not many enthusiasts study languages in terms of their theory. Usually everyone is interested in just chatting with foreigners in their dialects instead of figuring out why verbs and adjectives behave the way they do. Nevertheless, linguistics is extremely interesting and helps answer questions like: "Is English an inflectional or agglutinative language?" There is little practical benefit for the average person, although, having understood the theory, one can understand how languages "work" and continue to study them almost intuitively.
History of linguistics
Ordinary people just communicate without analyzing how they do it, and why certain established expressions are the way they are. Nevertheless, there are those who are interested in the rules by which different adverbs are built. And those people who were interested in this long before our time literally invented the science that we know today as linguistics. Now it's hard to say who laid it downroots, because today this discipline is subdivided into a huge number of branches. But as for modern linguistics, the American scientist Leonard Bloomfield can be conditionally called its founder. His active work came at the beginning of the 20th century, and he managed to inspire his followers not only to develop theories, but also to apply them in practice.
About the same time, the current typology, which characterized languages as more or less developed on the basis of very conditional features, was rejected. This problem was ignored until the middle of the 20th century, when a new classification based on the ideas of Friedrich Schlegel and Wilhelm von Humboldt was adopted. Morphological types of languages - amorphous, agglutinative, inflectional - were singled out by the latter. It is she, with some additions, that continues to be used now.
Types of modern languages
Modern linguistics uses the following classification:
1. By grammatical features:
- analytical;
- synthetic.
2. By morphological features:
- insulating;
- agglutinative language;
- inflectional or fusional;
- incorporating.
These two categories should not be confused, although in fact almost all isolating languages coincide with analytic languages. However, completely different factors are considered here. And the morphology in this case is much more interesting.
Agglutinative
This term is used not only in linguistics, but also, for example, in biology. If we turn to Latin, which is, so to speak, the "mother" of most terms, the literal translation will sound like "gluing". The agglutinative type of language suggests that the formation of new vocabulary units occurs by attaching additional parts (affixes) to the stem or root: suffixes, prefixes, etc. It is important that each formant corresponds to only one meaning, and in this case there are practically no exceptions in the rules of declension and conjugation. There is an opinion that this type is older and less developed compared to the inflectional type. However, there is evidence of the opposite point of view, so for now there is no reason to consider agglutinative languages more primitive.
Examples are quite diverse: Finno-Ugric and Turkic, Mongolian and Korean, Japanese, Georgian, Indian and some African, as well as most of the artificial dialects (Esperanto, Ido) belong to this group.
The phenomenon of agglutination can be considered on the example of the Kyrgyz language, which has a dictionary unit that can be translated in Russian as "dostoruma". "Dos" is a stem meaning "friend". The "tor" part is plural. "Mind" carries the sign of belonging to the first person, that is, "mine." Finally, "a" denotes the dative case. The result is "my friends".
Inflectional
In this group, formants involved in word formation can carry several grammatical features at once, inextricably linked. So, for example, it happens in Russian.
The word "green" has the ending -om, which combines the signs of the dative case, the singular and the masculine. Such formants are called inflections.
Traditionally, this type of language includes almost all stable Indo-European languages: German, Russian, Latin, as well as the Semitic and Sami groups. Researchers have noticed a tendency to lose inflections as speech develops. So, in the past, English also belonged to this group, and now it is, in fact, almost analytical with the preservation of few rudiments. Another example of transformation can be called Armenian, which was influenced by Caucasian dialects and passed into the appropriate category. It is now an agglutinative language.
Insulating
This type is characterized by the almost complete absence of morphemes. Word formation mostly occurs with the use of auxiliary words, a rigid structure in sentences, and even intonation.
An excellent example for this category is classical Chinese, which completely lacks such concepts as declension of parts of speech and conjugation of verbs. To indicate whether an action happened in the past or will happen in the future, the adverb of time is used and sometimesservice words. Links are used to express belonging, and special particles are used to compose questions. At the same time, the correct understanding of the meaning of sentences is achieved due to the rigid word order. A similar situation is observed in Vietnamese, Khmer, Lao.
Very close to this type is English, which has almost completely lost signs of inflection.
Incorporating
This relatively new category, not included in the classical typology, has a lot in common with agglutinative. In fact, these two phenomena are of the same nature and often occur together. Nevertheless, linguistics distinguishes them, considering that if agglutination affects only the word, then incorporation can be observed in the whole sentence, that is, the unit can be expressed by a complex verb-nominal complex.
Mixed
This type is not singled out separately, preferring to call certain adverbs transitional forms if they carry both signs of inflection and can be classified as an agglutinative language for some aspects. These are Russian, Caucasian, Hamito-Semitic, Bantu, North American and some others. They are usually simply called synthetic, indicating the degree of inflection.
Be that as it may, it is quite difficult to single out agglutinative, inflectional, isolating and incorporating languages in their pure form. One way or another, almost every example will carry the small features of the others. This is due both to evolution and to the close interaction of languages in modernworld of a lot of borrowing and tracing.
Development of languages
For several decades, researchers have been building theories about which types are considered more modern and perfect. However, no significant progress has yet been made in this direction. The fact is that in the process of development, a language can change typology, sometimes even several times. This was at some point the reason that the classification was disappointed for almost half a century.
Nevertheless, this topic is quite interesting in itself, and modern linguistics offers several related theories:
- Convergent evolution. It is assumed that each language develops according to its own rules, acquiring and losing various features, according to which it can be attributed to different types. At the same time, analogies and coincidences with other adverbs are most often accidental.
- Spiral evolution. There is an opinion that any agglutinative language eventually becomes inflectional. Then it is gradually lost, there is a transformation into an isolating type. After that, the language returns to agglutination in one form or another.
