The morphological classification of languages is one of the most important issues of linguistics. This method of dividing into groups all existing means of communication is the newest. Background to it appeared only in the XVI-XVII century. The first monumental works on this problem were written in the late XIX - early XX century.
Morphological and genealogical classification of languages
These two types of division into species are the main ones.
The first of them appeared during the Renaissance. In the science of antiquity, almost no attention was paid to the problems of philology, except for the works devoted to Latin and Greek. These languages were considered among the scientific community the only ones worthy of research. All others were called barbaric. It was considered unworthy to investigate them, since even the sound of foreign language speech itself usually caused ridicule. People speaking obscure dialects were compared to animals that made an inarticulate growl.
In the Middle Ages, the beginning of the history of the development of the morphological classification of languages was also out of the question. During this period, all research in this area came down to attempts to explain the whole variety of dialects using the legend of the Tower of Babel.
Renaissance Discovery
The state of affairs changed only with the advent of a new historical period. At that time, many Western scholars and artists engaged in the study of the works of ancient philosophers. This served to increase interest in the classical languages, ancient Greek and Latin, in which these works were created.
Also at that time, many geographical discoveries were made. Mariners conquered new lands. So, there was a need to communicate with the local population of these countries. Accordingly, it was necessary to get specialists in the field of exotic languages as quickly as possible. But how to do that? It was necessary to draw at least some parallel with the languages known to Europeans. It was then that the first attempts were made to find common features between them.
The first of the known classifications of languages appeared in the XV-XVI centuries thanks to the works of Italian linguists.
Related languages
The pioneer in this area was the French scientist Scaliger. In the 16th century, he compiled a list of languages that he called the mothers of everyone else. Among them were: Greek, Latin, Arabic, Irish and others. Of course, this work contained a rational kernel, and the ideas of the French linguist later served as the basis for numerous studies. However, much of what Scaliger wrote about did not have any scientific evidence, and at times was based only on his guesses.
Discoverer Errors
The following statement can be cited as an example of the obvious error contained in his scientific work: “All of the named mother languages are absolutely independent. Their vocabulary and morphology have nothing to do with each other.” This scientist backed up his theory with an example, citing the word "god" in various languages.
Interestingly, Scaliger did not notice a clear resemblance between the Latin word "deus" and the Greek "theos", which is extremely surprising. And accordingly, his statement about the independence of all these languages can also be called into question.
Wonderland
The impetus for a new round of the development of linguistics was the numerous expeditions of sailors to the shores of India, which were made by travelers such as Marco Polo, Athanasius Nikitin and others. During these voyages, many monuments of oriental literature were brought to Europe. Scientists then discovered for the first time the Sanskrit language, in which all ancient Indian literature was written.
Although at that far time there was not yet a sufficiently developed morphological classification of languages, but nonetheless, linguists immediately realized that in classical languages (Greek and Latin) and Sanskrit you can find many similarities. They contained similarities both in the lexical material (the roots of many thousands of words turned out to be the same) and at the morphological level (word formation occurs in a similar way).
New discoveries
Nevertheless, in order to make out in Sanskrit a relative of Latin and ancient Greek, scientists needed about three centuries. Only at the end of the 18th - beginning of the 19th centuries did they come to this conclusion.
Then the first genealogical classification of languages appeared, that is, one based on the geographical position of countries where one or another language is spoken, as well as on the presence of languages of common ancestors.
However, there were scientists who expressed an absolutely revolutionary point of view on this problem. They said that it is not entirely appropriate to classify languages that have a common ancestor, or those that contain a sufficient amount of similar lexical material. After all, the roots can be borrowed. Moreover, the morphological and syntactic structures will be completely different. These researchers proposed the introduction of a morphological classification of languages based on a similar composition of words, as well as ways to formulate new terms.
The emergence of a new system
The morphological classification of languages is based on the feature of word formation.
Among the founders of this type separation method was the famous American linguist Edward Sepir. He is also known for his contribution to the development of the theory that the features of the language spoken by a person determine the characteristics of his mental processes, worldview, and so on.
One of the principles of the morphological classification of languages is the following: scientists divide the number of morphemes (that is, such components as the root, suffix, prefix, and so on) contained in a particular text by the number of words. At present, it is customary to evaluate the degree of complexity of a language by the number that is obtained in the process of such an action. The smallest coefficient may be one.
This result was obtained in the study of the Vietnamese language. You can decipher this indicator of the morphological classification of languages briefly as follows: one morpheme per word. That is, in the Vietnamese language, all parts of speech consist only of the root. Accordingly, we can say that people who speak it do not encounter such phenomena as declination, conjugation, and so on.
Typological morphological classification of languages
The principle of dividing all languages of the world into types presented above refers to the so-called typological classification. It relies on structural features. In addition to the morphological classification of languages, lexical, syntactic, phonetic, and others can also be attributed to this species. However, the first is still the most popular.
Types of Languages
So what types of languages does the typological morphological classification divide into?
The first group, which should be called, is the root (isolating) group. This includes languages in which each word contains only one morpheme - the root. Accordingly, in them there is neither declination nor conjugation. All these languages have certain common features.
The word order in them always affects their meaning. The location of the members of the proposal is strictly regulated. For example, the subject must necessarily be used before the predicate.
Some of these languages are vocal. This title has nothing to do with singing. Although the teachers of these languages say that those who study them should have a sufficiently developed ear for music.
Here, it is understood that the words in them can change their meaning depending on the intonation with which they are pronounced. These are mainly eastern languages, such as Chinese, Korean, Vietnamese and so on. In them, fame really does not change depending on declination and conjugation. Their name - isolating - can be explained as follows: each word in a sentence does not affect the shape of others. Strictly regulated is only the place of members of the proposal. One more characteristic of all these languages should be mentioned: each word in them contains a single syllable. Therefore, without even knowing Chinese (Vietnamese) and hearing the monologue on it, you can easily determine how many words have been said.
Agglutination
In this article, the languages of the world according to morphological classification are presented in the following sequence: they are named as the composition of the word becomes more complicated.
The second group includes the so-called agglutinative languages.
In them the word may already consist not only of one, but of several morphemes. Moreover, each has a stable form and significance. So, in Uzbek and many Turkic languages, the affix "lar" usually means the plural. The word "kyz" means "girl". In the plural, this noun will be in the form of kyzlar.
These languages include all Turkic, as well as some Finno-Ugric and Caucasian.
Inflectional languages
Why doesn’t the Russian language belong to this group? Indeed, in it words are also formed by adding to the root of certain affixes that give it a new meaning.
The Russian language can be classified as an inflective type of language according to morphological classification. Here, as in the previous group, new forms are formed by adding the corresponding parts of the word, however here these prefixes and suffixes are not static. For example, the plural of nouns can be formed using different endings, depending on the root. If you want to get the plural form of the word “boot”, add the ending “and” to it, and if you need to do the same operation with the root “machine”, then in this case the affix “s” is used.
Universal affixes
In addition, in this subgroup, each particular morpheme is not only responsible for a number, case, or other property. It can combine these functions in itself, which cannot be said about similar parts of the word in agglutinative languages.
Example
You can consider this phenomenon as an example of ending in the already mentioned word "boots".
In this case, this part gives it not only the plural, but also is responsible for the nominative case, as well as the masculine.
Another group is the so-called analytic languages. In them, for the formation of a new form of the word, one must not change the composition, but use additional tokens. Such a language is, for example, modern English. Here, auxiliary verbs are widely used to form predicate forms.
Sentence Word
The last group of the classification under consideration is the so-called incorporating languages.
In them, the word usually has many morphemes. This is explained by the fact that in these languages a whole sentence usually fits in its composition.
These languages include Chukchi and some dialects of the Indians.
It is extremely difficult for a Russian-speaking person to understand the essence of this phenomenon. However, in any language, in addition to words formed according to its belonging to one or another group of morphological classification, there are also exceptions related to other types. You could even say that there are no languages that can be described as “pure” inflectional or agglutinative. Therefore, some elements of incorporation can be found in Russian. For example, the vernacular word "fishing" contains two roots, the first of which denotes the object on which the action is directed, and the second - the process itself. Something similar is happening in incorporating languages.
Language is a constantly evolving phenomenon. Therefore, its structure itself can change over time. So, the English language, now analytical, was once inflective. The process of its development can be traced by considering the morphological classification of verbs in Germanic languages and changes in it. Today, English is moving towards root isolation.