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 Russian language belong to, these questions will not arise so easily in everyday situations. Typology of languages is significant for people working in the field of communications and international technology. Every student philologist teaches this by heart. Many would probably say that this information is not necessary and unnecessary for them, but is it so? It may be worth knowing about the place of your native language in a comprehensive system in order to be aware of your linguistic uniqueness and to understand the historical and cultural value of the words that we pronounce every day.
general information
The division of languages exists according to different classifications. According to the genealogical classification, languages are divided into families, those in turn into groups that also have branches. The division into language families, known to almost everyone, includes Indo-European, Caucasian, Sino-Tibetan, Altai 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. Russian language belongs to the Slavic group of Indo-European languages. This classification of languages indicates their kinship. In addition, languages are divided according to other characteristics. There is a morphological and grammatical classification.
Morphological classification of languages.
The morphological or typological classification of languages, which indicates to us, as the name implies, the type of language formation, is of no small importance. According to this classification, there are four types of languages: 1) isolating, or amorphous 2) incorporating or polysynthetic 3) inflectional 4) agglutinative. This topic was dealt with by the greatest linguists of all time. For example, the German philologists August and Friedrich Schlegel at one time came to the conclusion that languages are a synthetic and analytical way of education. Another famous German philologist Wilhelm von Humbolt improved the theory, bringing it to the form in which we have today.
Inflectional and agglutinative languages as opposed.
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 implies a flexible structure of languages. Inflectional languages are the word-formation languages in which it is built by adding various inflections to the base of the word with diverse and multitasking meanings. The word agglutinative comes from the Latin agglutinatio - “gluing” and implies an invariable, stable system.
Agglutinative languages
Agglutinative languages are word-formation languages in which 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 take an example: the Tatar word “ hatlarynda ”, which means “ in his letters ”, consists of these morphemes: “ hut” means “letter”, “ lar ” is a morpheme with the plural, “ un ” is a third-person morpheme, “Yes” has the meaning of 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. Add to it the morpheme “lar” - “ bash-lar” and now it means “heads”, that is, the morpheme “lar” has a single meaning - the plural.
Inflective languages
Now we will analyze inflectional languages in more detail. As mentioned above, morphemes in this case have multiple meanings, which we can see on the example of the native Russian language. The adjective " beautiful " has the ending " ost ", which indicates to us the masculine gender, nominative case and plural at the same time. Thus, one morpheme is 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 inflective. Other examples of inflected languages can be German or Latin, as well as most of the languages of the Indo-European family known to us , in particular, all languages of the Slavic group. Returning to the German scientists of the 18th century, it is worth noting that the inflected language, in turn, can be a synthetic or analytical way of education. The synthetic method implies the fact that word formation occurs by adding various morphemes, suffixes and postfixes. The analytical method allows you to use the same service words. For example, in Russian we can say “ I am writing ” using the ending of the future tense, which is a synthetic way of education. Or you can say “ I will write ”, using the official word of the future tense “ I will ”, which is an example of an analytical method. It is worth noting that there are no clear distinctions in this classification, many languages combine different ways of word formation. An interesting question is whether English, the most studied today, is inflective or agglutinative?
Is English Inflective?
To answer this question, you need to conduct a small analysis based on the information obtained above. Take the English verb “ sleeps, ” which translates to “ sleeps, ” where the ending “ s ” has the meaning of the third person singular, the present tense. One morpheme - three meanings. Overall, English is inflective. To strengthen the theory, a couple more examples: the verb " have done ”with the meaning“ done ”, where the official word“ have ”tells us about the plural and perfect time at the same time; " Is eating ”-“ eats ”, where the official word“ is ”carries the meaning of the singular, third person, present. The abundance of examples with official words in the English language speaks of a predominantly analytical way of word formation.
Briefly about isolating and polysynthetic languages
Inflectional and agglutigative languages are the most widespread in the world, but nevertheless, there are two more types. Isolating or amorphous languages are languages in which word formation is characterized by the complete absence of word changes and additions of morphemes. Hence their very name. Such languages include, for example, Chinese. The phrase " cha in bu he " will mean " I do not drink tea ." Incorporating or polysynthetic are perhaps the most difficult languages to learn and pronounce. Word formation in them occurs by adding words to each other formed sentences. As, for example, in the Mexican language “ ninakakwa” , where “ ni ” - “ I ”, “ naka ” - “ eat ”, “ kwa ” - “ meat ”.