Etalon language.
It is a linguistic means with the help of which scholars
fulfill the process of comparing languages. The notion etalon language is quite
new which has been developed and elaborated by the Russian linguist
B.A.Uspenskiy. He says that any language is based on the meta- language,which is
the same as an etalon language to make transformations from it to real languages
and back, from real languages to an etalon.(Uspenskiy B.A.,1965). It is still used
for comparative purposes. For practical purposes etalon language can be divided
into maximal and minimal.
Maximal etalon language is the whole language with the highly developed
structure, which is used for the purpose of comparison. For example, the Latin
language was used as etalon for compiling many European grammars. Minimal
etalon language can be expressed by:
1.
A special abstract system made for comparison;
2.
Some artificial language made for comparison;
3.
Special linguistic methods;
4.
Grammatical, lexical and other linguistic categories; 5.Typological categories;
6.Concrete language; 7.Semantic fields;
8. Different features concerning the phonetic and grammatical pecularities.
Typological classification.
There are two types of classification of
languages in linguistics: Genealogical, which studies etic units: concrete sounds,
words, syntactic units and so on. According to this classification languages are
grouped into the families, such as Indo-European, Semitic, Altaic and so on.
Typological classification is introduced by several linguists who treated languages
not according to their genetic backgrounds, these are W. Humboldt, E. Sapir, F.
Fortunatov. According to the opinion of these linguists languages are classified
into 5 types:
1.
Isolated
2.
Agglutinated
3.
Inflected
4.
Polysynthetic
5.
Agglutinated - inflecled.
The main criterion for this type of classification is the means of expression
of synthetic relations among words in the sentence. According to their relations
among the words in the sentence they may use different means, for example,
inflections, function words, intonation, word order, sound interchange, stress and
so on.
Isolated
type
of languages is characterized by the absence of inflections and
affixational morphemes expressing the relationship among the words in the
sentence. This type includes ancient Chinese and other languages. It is
characterized by the following features:
a)
words are unchangeable
b)
word formation
is
less developed
c)
the main signal of grammar is word order
d)
intonation may form new words and express grammatical meanings
e)
words are not distributed into parts of speech
While speaking about isolating type of languages we mean that the root of
the word may express both the lexical and grammatical meanings. These type of
languages have no grammatical suffixes and word order expresses syntactic
relations among the words in the sentence.
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