Geneological classification of languages
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GENEOLOGICAL CLASSIFICATION OF LANGUAGES Plan: Language classification Genealogical Classification of Languages Genealogical Classification in Historical Genetic and typological classification of languages There are two kinds of classification of languages practiced in linguistics: genetic (or genealogical) and typological. The purpose of genetic classification is to group languages into families according to their degree of diachronic relatedness. For example, within the Indo-European family, such subfamilies as Germanic or Celtic are recognized; these subfamilies comprise German, English, Dutch, Swedish, Norwegian, Danish, and others, on the one hand, and Irish, Welsh, Breton, and others, on the other. So far, most of the languages of the world have been grouped only tentatively into families, and many of the classificatory schemes that have been proposed will no doubt be radically revised as further progress is made. A typological classification groups languages into types according to their structural characteristics. The most famous typological classification is probably that of isolating, agglutinating, and inflecting (or fusional) languages, which was frequently invoked in the 19th century in support of an evolutionary theory of language development. Roughly speaking, an isolating language is one in which all the words are morphologically unanalyzable (i.e., in which each word is composed of a single morph); Chinese and, even more strikingly, Vietnamese are highly isolating. An agglutinating language (e.g., Turkish) is one in which the word forms can be segmented into morphs, each of which represents a single grammatical category. An inflecting language is one in which there is no one-to-one correspondence between particular word segments and particular grammatical categories. The older Indo-European languages tend to be inflecting in this sense. For example, the Latin suffix -is represents the combination of categories “singular” and “genitive” in the word form hominis “of the man,” but one part of the suffix cannot be assigned to “singular” and another to “genitive,” and -is is only one of many suffixes that in different classes (or declensions) of words represent the combination of “singular” and “genitive.” There is, in principle, no limit to the variety of ways in which languages can be grouped typologically. One can distinguish languages with a relatively rich phonemic inventory from languages with a relatively poor phonemic inventory, languages with a high ratio of consonants to vowels from languages with a low ratio of consonants to vowels, languages with a fixed word order from languages with a free word order, prefixing languages from suffixing languages, and so on. The problem lies in deciding what significance should be attached to particular typological characteristics. Although there is, not surprisingly, a tendency for genetically related languages to be typologically similar in many ways, typological similarity of itself is no proof of genetic relationship. Nor does it appear true that languages of a particular type will be associated with cultures of a particular type or at a certain stage of development. From work in typology in the second half of the 20th century, it emerged that certain logically unconnected features tend to occur together, so the presence of feature A in a given language will tend to imply the presence of feature B. The discovery of unexpected implications of this kind calls for an explanation and gives a stimulus to research in many branches of linguistics. a classification based on the genetic principle—that is, the grouping of genetically related languages in a language family. The genealogical classification of languages became possible only after the emergence of the concept of linguistic relationship and the acceptance of the principle of the historical method in linguistic research in the 19th century. Classifications are made as the result of the study of languages, using the comparative and historical methods. Being historical and genetic, the genealogical classification of languages—in contrast to the multiplicity of typological and areal classifications—is in the form of a single scheme. Being linguistic, it does not coincide with anthropological classification, and, in particular, it does not presuppose that peoples who speak related languages are also members of the same race. The existence of systemic tendencies in language development is used to prove the genetic relationship of languages. The presence of systematic correlations—regular sound correspondences in the indigenous language materials (vocabulary and grammatical elements)—serves as the specific criterion for this purpose. However, the absence of systematic correlations between comparable languages does not prove the absence of a relationship between them, since the relationship might be too remote for any systematic correlations to be revealed in the linguistic data. Although language families are continuously evolving, their formation generally predates the appearance of class society. The factor of linguistic differentiation plays a leading role in the formation of linguistic families, given the phenomenon of the parallel and convergent development of languages. Language families are usually made up of smaller groups that unite languages that have closer genetic relationships. Many of these groups originated in a much later period—for example, the Slavic, Germanic, Italic (from which the Romance languages developed), Celtic, and Indo-Iranian groups of the Indo-European language family. Modern genealogical linguistic classification does not provide any grounds to support the once-popular linguistic concept of the monogenesis of the languages of the world. The best-known language families of Eurasia and Oceania include Indo-European, Uralic, Turkic, Mongolian, Manchu-Tungusic, Chukchi-Kamchadal, Sino-Tibetan, Mon-Khmer, Malayo-Polynesian, Dravidian, and Munda. Four large language families are recognized in Africa—Semito-Hamitic, or Afro-Asiatic (also spoken in the adjacent territory of Asia), Nilo-Saharan, Congo-Kordofanian, and Khoisan. Less adequately developed are the genealogical classifications of the aboriginal languages of America and Australia, where genealogical classification is not yet delimited from typological classifications. (In particular, E. Sapir’s classification of North American languages into six families has yet to be verified.) In view of the difficulty involved in differentiating distantly related languages and unrelated languages, purely hypothetical constructs are encountered in a number of instances: compare the Altaic family (embracing the Turkic, Mongolian, Manchu-Tungusic, and sometimes Korean, languages), the Caucasian family (including the Abkhazo-Adygeian, Kartvelian, and Nakhian-Dagestanian languages), and the Nostratic family (consisting of several large families of Eurasian languages). The so-called mixed languages also find a place within the well-known language families. (For example, almost all the Creole languages are placed in the Indo-European family.) There are isolated languages, genetically unrelated to any other language, which can be regarded as the sole representatives of separate families—for example, Basque in Europe; Ket, Burushaski, Nivkh, and Ainu in Asia; and Kutenai, Zuñi, and Keres in America. Different methods exist for classifying languages, depending on whether the task is to work out the relations among languages already known to be related—internal language classification—or whether the task is to establish that certain languages are related—external language classification. The comparative method in historical linguistics, developed during the latter part of the 19th century, represents one method for internal language classification; lexicostatistics, developed during the 1950s, represents another. Elements of lexicostatistics have been transformed and carried over into modern computational linguistic phylogenetics, and currently efforts are also being made to automate the comparative method. Recent years have seen rapid progress in the development of methods, tools, and resources for language classification. For instance, computational phylogenetic algorithms and software have made it possible to handle the classification of many languages using explicit models of language change, and data have been gathered for two thirds of the world’s language, allowing for rapid, exploratory classifications. There are also many open questions and venues for future research, for instance: What are the real-world counterparts to the nodes in a family tree structure? How can shortcomings in the traditional method of comparative historical linguistics be overcome? How can the understanding of the results that computational linguistic phylogenetics have to offer be improved? External language classification, a notoriously difficult task, has also benefitted from the advent of computational power. While, in the past, the simultaneous comparison of many languages for the purpose of discovering deep genealogical links was carried out in a haphazard fashion, leaving too much room for the effect of chance similarities to kick in, this sort of activity can now be done in a systematic, objective way on an unprecedented scale. The ways of producing final, convincing evidence for a deep genealogical relation, however, have not changed much. There is some room for improvement in this area, but even more room for improvement in the way that proposals for long-distance relations are evaluated. 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. In spite of a long tradition of linguists dealing empirically with the classification of languages, genealogical classification does not stand out as a subfield of linguistics or even of historical linguistics. It is only during the early 21st century that introductions to issues of language classification are beginning to fill more than just a few pages in textbooks. The change is largely due to the increasing popularity and practical viability of computational methods in language classification. The present article is biased toward early 21st-century literature for the same reason. The general criterion for including a work in this bibliography is that it should make an explicit methodological contribution—the only exceptions being the first section on introductory works and the last on empirical contributions. The latter, however, is restricted to classifications on a worldwide basis and to a list of some works that can be viewed as models for establishing relatedness among languages. There is a certain discrepancy between theory and practice in language classification because many proposed methods have had little practical application, and far from all of the empirical work has followed strict, methodological guidelines. Thus the present selection of works is not necessarily representative of the practice of historical linguists, but it does attempt to include all the major theoretical works that have to a greater or lesser extent guided practitioners. Some features can't be explained by a tree model though. The tree model can explain why languages with a common ancestor share a feature. But what about features shared by languages with no common ancestor? These are usually caused by some areal sharing and wave model tries to capture that. Protolanguages are postulated lost parent languages, from which other languages have developed. A language family is formed from the daughter languages of a protolanguage (the mother language). If some or all of the daughter languages of a protolanguage are attested (meaning we have evidence of the language surviving to this day), we can attempt to partially reconstruct the protolanguage itself. In the graph above (which uses the 'tree model' of historical linguistics), the protolanguages are 15, 6, 20, 7. Examples which are universally accepted as having existed are • Proto-Indo-European - the common ancestor of the Indo-European language family (of western and southern Eurasia) and the most researched protolanguage, and suggested to have been spoken between 4,500 BC and 2,500 BC • Proto-Uralic - the common ancestor of the Uralic language family (mostly in northern Eurasia) which is suggested to have been spoken between 7,000 BC and 2,000 BC • Proto-Dravidian - the common ancestor of the Dravidian languages (mostly in southern India and north-western Sri Lanka) which is suggested to have been spoken approximately between 4,000 BC and 3,000 BC Protolanguages can be partially attested like which means that we have some evidence of what the language looks like. Vulgar Latin (the colloquial Latin of the Late Roman Republic) is the protolanguage from which the Romance languages (Spanish, Italian, French, etc.) developed. In this case the language is attested in surviving texts, and Ecclesiastical Latin is still the liturgical language of the Catholic Church. Otherwise, we can have completely unattested protolanguages like Proto-Indo-European for which we have no written evidence. In this case the only choice is to attempt to reconstruct the language using the daughter language(s) of this parent protolanguage for which we do have written evidence. The most common and successful method is the comparative method, which was developed in the study of ProtoIndo-European). An important question is how far can we go in the reconstruction of a protolanguage? Of course, for unattested protolanguages, we cannot ever know if we are 'correct', thus there are no objective criteria we can use to evaluate the reconstructions of a protolanguage. This process of reconstruction has been described as an 'intuitive undertaking' - essentially we are making an educated, but error-prone, guess. Here is an example which suggests that Italian and English came from the same language • In Italian: padre, piede, pesce • In English: father, food, fish By analyzing examples like these we can begin to construct the phonetic and phonological changes the took place between the ancestral protolanguage and its daughter languages, and from there can work backwards to construct the words of the protolanguage from the vocabulary of its daughter languages. Linguistic reconstruction is the practice of establishing the features of an unattested ancestor language (protolanguage) of one or more given languages. The most used reconstruction is the comparative reconstruction which establishes features of the ancestor of two or more related languages, belonging to the same language family, by means of the comparative method. Method Firstly, it is needed to group together languages that are thought to have arisen from a common protolanguage. They must meet certain criteria in order to be grouped together. This is a process called subgrouping. Since this grouping is based purely on linguistics, manuscripts and other historical documentation should be analyzed to accomplish this step. One of the criteria is that the grouped languages usually exemplify shared innovation, which means that the languages must show common changes made throughout history. In addition, most grouped languages have shared retention. That means that there are features that stayed the same in all of the languages in the group. Then the comparative method is applied to a group of languages featuring similar characteristics to reconstruct protolanguage for this group. Principles of the comparative method: - every reconstruction works with changes which are probable, systematic - as few changes between the protolanguage and the descendants as possible - reconstructions should fill in the gaps in the systems rather than create unbalanced systems: Present-day Slavonic data: Cz. hlava (head) what is original, g or h? Pol. głowa Rus. golova Upper Sorb. hłowa Answer: build a system: Reconstruction of Old Slavonic: Voiceless voiced Labial p b Dental t d Velar k ? (g!)) Other approaches There were other approaches used for reconstruction than comparative method, because some linguists thought that comparative method can only reach back a few thousand years before the evidence fades out, so something else must be tried. One example of this is multilateral comparison, which is looking at many languages across a few words instead of looking at many words across a few languages. But all of the other approaches turned out to be flawed and afford no new reliable insights, so they are no longer used. Comparative Method of the Reconstruction of a Protolanguage - this method compares words and expressions in different languages or dialects that derived from the same ancestor language - the comparison may be done on different levels of language (phonological, semantic, ...) - languages reconstructed using this method are called proto-languages (e.g. Proto-IndoEuropean, Proto-Uralic) Internal Reconstruction of Former Phases of a Language - as opposed to the comparative method the internal reconstruction studies only a single language. The assumptions about the earlier versions of the language are made based on irregularities within the language. - languages reconstructed by this method have prefix "pre" (e.g. Pre-Old Japanese) Glottochronology -- linguistic method to estimate a separation date between two genetically related languages. It studies the rate of change occurring in the vocabularies of languages for the purpose of calculating the length of time during which two related languages have developed independently. It rests upon statistical comparison and it is based on the assumption that the rate of vocabulary replacement is constant over sufficiently long time periods. Often criticized, uncertain. Kinds of linguistics changes and examples Many different kinds of changes can occur within a language. This is a general classification of some of those linguistic changes with specific examples. Sound changes: there are phonemic and non-phonemic changes, and among the first ones there are mergers and splits. Here are two examples of mergers in Spanish (two distinct phonemes merging into one): ʎ, j → j in most of La n America and a big part of Spain (making halla and haya sound the same) and θ, s → s in La n America and some dialects in Spain (making caza and casa sound the same). Analogical changes: a change happens by analogy of how something else works in the language. For example, in English, the pattern of the verb speak/spoke/spoken developed by analogy with verbs of the pattern break/broke/broken. Semantic and lexical changes: for example, by widening (the range of meanings of a word increases). Salary in English comes from salārium in Latin, which was a soldier’s allotment of salt (based on Latin sal “salt”). The word dog originally referred to a specific powerful breed of dog. Syntactic change: for example, by borrowing: Pipil (a language in El Salvador) borrowed the comparative expression mas … ke from Spanish (más … que, “more … than”). Cognate word forms Cognate words are pairs of words in (usually) different languages that share a common origin. Firstly, they are not be confused with doublets, which are words in the same language which have a common origin. While technically speaking, doublets are cognates, cognates don't have to be in the same language, i.e. doublets are a subset of cognates. Secondly, they are not to be confused with borrowed words, as these words are simply stolen from other languages to fill in lexicon gaps. Whereas cognate words have evolved and diverged from a common origin. Some examples of cognate words are: brother (English) vs Bruder (German) dish (English) vs Tisch (German; table) noche (Spanish) vs Nacht (German) fragile (English) vs frail (English). REFERENCES Ivanov, V. V. Genealogicheskaia klassifikatsiia iazykov i poniatie iazykovogo rodstva. Moscow, 1954. Sharadzenidze, T. S. Klassifikatsiia iazykov i ikh printsipy. Tbilisi, 1955. Iazyki narodov SSSR, vols. 1-5. Moscow-Leningrad, 1966-68. Meillet, A., and M. Cohen. Les Langues du monde, 2nd ed; Paris, 1952. Greenberg, J. Studies in African Linguistic Classification. New Haven, Conn., 1955. Lehmann, W. P. Historical Linguistics: An Introduction. 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