Typological classification

This classification divides languages irrespective of their origin, because the principle of division is morphemic structure of the word. A bit later linguists also studied similarities in phonology and syntax, but morphology is always in the focus of interest.

History. Fridrich Schlegel (German linguist) compared 4 languages (Sanskrit, Greek, Latin and Turkish) and as a result he divided languages into flective and non-flective. Later the second type was called affixal. Now they are also called agglutinative (Turkish). By that time some other languages (Chinese) were already well-studied. But Chinese was different from both types. Such languages didn't use affixes and inflections. They mostly used one-morphemic words that are not changeable. So they were called isolating (amorphous or root languages).

Schlegel also divided flective languages into analytical and synthetic type. This classification was completed by Humboldt who included the 4^th type which was called incorporating or polysynthetic (incorporating) type. He proved the fact that there are no pure languages because most of them combine features of different language types. So dominant features are taken into consideration when languages are classified.

Flective languages have the following distinctive features:

1. Wide variability of forms which is achieved by regular use of flections.
2. In most cases flection is polysemantic
3. affixes are used in different positions to the root (prefixes, infixes, confixes or circumfixes, etc.)
4. the word in such languages is an autonomous unit that has formal markers of relations with other words in the sentence. It is realized in agreement and government

All IE languages belong to flective type. These languages are divided into synthetic and analytical types. Analytical languages prefer functional words to the use of inflections. They also use syntactical and phonetic means (English, French, Bulgarian).

Synthetic languages express lexical and grammatical meanings in one unit. Words have reach paradigms. They use prefixes and suffixes more often than analytical. They use several types of declination and conjugation.

· Agglutinating languages differ from synthetic ones by the nature of affixes. They use monofunctional affixes which express only 1 grammatical meaning.

Баш (голова) — башлар (головы) pl

баштын — головы gen

башлартын — голов gen, pl

The boundaries between morphemes are always distinct and fusion is never used.

Historical changes of the morphemic structures do not take place. (simplification, reintegration, complication)

Only one type of declination and conjugation (finny-ugric, Finnish, Hungarian)

Amorphous type (isolating – because words don't change their form and nothing is added to them) (Chinese, Vietnamese, Korean)

1. the word as a rule is equal to the root and that's why they are also called root languages.
2. Grammatical meanings are expressed by functional words, word-order, musical stress and intonation:
   “ча» – чай, «во» – я, «бу» – не, «хэ» – пить
   ча во бу хэ — я не пью чай

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