The issue of language classification is, of course, very complex and capacious. What are inflectional languages, and what are they, what type of languages does the native language, Russian, belong to, these questions will not arise so easily in everyday situations. The typology of languages is significant for people working in the field of communications and international technologies. Every student of philology learns this by heart. Many would probably say that this information is not necessary and superfluous for them, but is it so? Perhaps it is worth knowing about the place of your native language in the all-round system in order to be aware of your linguistic uniqueness and understand the historical and cultural value of those words that we pronounce every day.
General information
Division of languages exists according to different classifications. According to the genealogical classification, languages are divided into families, which in turn are divided into groups that also have branches. The division into language families, known to almost everyone, includes Indo-European, Caucasian, Sino-Tibetan, Altaic and many other languages. In turn, the Indo-European family is divided into groups, Slavic, Germanic, Romance, etc. For example, English belongs to the Indo-European family, the Germanic group, the Western branch. The Russian language belongs to the Slavic group of Indo-European languages. This classification of languages indicates their relationship. In addition, languages are divided according to other criteria. There is a morphological and grammatical classification.
Morphological classification of languages
Of no small importance is the morphological or typological classification of languages, which indicates to us, as the name implies, the type of language formation. According to this classification, there are four types of languages: 1) isolating or amorphous 2) incorporating or polysynthetic 3) inflectional 4) agglutinative. The greatest linguists of all time de alt with this topic. For example, the German philologists August and Friedrich Schlegel once came to the conclusion that languages can be of synthetic and analytical methods of formation. Another famous German philologist, Wilhelm von Humboldt, improved the theory, bringing it to the form in which we have today.
Inflectional and agglutinative languages as opposites
To better understand the essence of these types, they should be disassembled in comparison, since they have opposite properties. Let's start with the word "inflectional" and its etymology. The word comes from the Latin flectivus "flexible", which means the flexible structure of languages. Inflectional languages are languages in which word formation is built by adding various inflections with diverse and multitasking meanings to the word stem. The word agglutinative comes from the Latin agglutinatio - "gluing" and implies an unchanging, stable system.
Agglutinative languages
Agglutinative languages are languages in which word formation occurs by adding morphemes with only one meaning, not subject to any change. Agglutinative languages include, for example, Turkic and Finno-Ugric. A striking example of the languages of this group is Japanese, Bashkir or Tatar. Let's look at an example: the Tatar word "khatlarynda", which means "in his letters" consists of these morphemes: "hat" - "letter", "lar" - a morpheme with a plural value, "yn" - a morpheme of the third person, "yes" has the meaning of the local case. That is, each morpheme has only one meaning. Another striking example from the Bashkir language: the word "bash", which translates as "head", has the meaning of the nominative case, singular. We add the morpheme "lar" to it - "bash-lar" and now it means "heads", that is, the morpheme "lar" has a single meaning - the plural.
Inflectional languages
Now let's take a closer look at inflectional languages. As mentioned above, morphemes in this case have multiple meanings, which we can see in the example of the native Russian language. The adjective "beautiful" has the ending "y", which indicates to us the masculine, nominative and plural at the same time. Thus, onemorpheme - three meanings. Let's take another example: the noun "book", the ending "a" carries the meaning of the feminine, singular and nominative case. Thus, we can conclude that the Russian language is inflectional. Other examples of languages of the inflectional type can be German or Latin, as well as most of the languages of the Indo-European family known to us, in particular, all the languages of the Slavic group. Returning to the German scientists of the 18th century, it is worth noting that the inflectional language, in turn, can be a synthetic or analytical way of formation. The synthetic method implies the fact that word formation occurs by adding various morphemes, suffixes and postfixes. The analytical method also allows the use of function words. For example, in Russian we can say “I am writing” using the future tense ending, which is a synthetic way of formation. Or you can say "I will write" using the function word of the future tense "I will", which is an example of an analytical method. It should be noted that there are no clear distinctions in this classification, many languages combine different ways of word formation. An interesting question is whether English, today the most studied language, is inflectional or agglutinative?
Is English inflectional?
To answer this question, you need to conduct a small analysis based on the information received above. Let's take the English verb "sleeps", which translates "sleeps", where the ending "s" mattersthird person singular, present tense. One morpheme - three meanings. So, English is an inflectional language. To strengthen the theory, a couple more examples: the verb “have done” with the meaning “done”, where the function word “have” tells us about the plural and the perfect tense at the same time; “is eating” - “eats”, where the service word “is” carries the meaning of the singular, third person, present tense. The abundance of examples with functional words in English speaks of a predominantly analytical way of word formation.
Briefly about isolating and polysynthetic languages
Inflectional and agglutative languages are the most common in the world, but there are still two types. Isolating or amorphous languages are languages in which word formation is characterized by a complete absence of word changes and additions of morphemes. Hence their very name. Such languages include, for example, Chinese. The phrase "cha wo bu he" would mean "I don't drink tea". Incorporating or polysynthetic languages are perhaps the most difficult languages to learn and speak. Word formation in them occurs by adding words to each other to form sentences. As, for example, in the Mexican language "ninakakwa", where "ni" - "I", "naka" - "eat", "kwa" - "meat".
