Indo-European family of languages. Formation of the Indo-European family of languages

The hypothesis of two ancestral homelands for Indo-Europeans on the territory of the Armenian Highlands and in the steppes of Eastern Europe was formulated by Miller back in 1873 based on the proximity of the Indo-European proto-language with the Semitic-Hamitic and Caucasian languages.

In 1934, Professor Emil Forrer of Switzerland expressed the opinion that the Indo-European language was formed as a result of the crossing of two unrelated languages. N. S. Trubetskoy, K. K. Ulenbek, O. S. Shirokov and B. V. Gornung suggest that this crossing occurred between a language of the Ural-Altaic type and a language of the Caucasian-Semitic type.

Indo-European migrations should be considered not as a total ethnic “expansion”, but as a movement primarily of the Indo-European dialects themselves, together with a certain part of the population, layering on various ethnic groups and transmitting their language to them. The last point shows the inconsistency of hypotheses based primarily on anthropological criteria in the ethnolinguistic attribution of archaeological cultures.

The Indo-European language family is the most widely spoken in the world. Its distribution area includes almost all of Europe, both Americas and continental Australia, as well as a significant part of Africa and Asia. More than 2.5 billion people speak Indo-European languages. All languages of modern Europe belong to this family of languages, with the exception of Basque, Hungarian, Sami, Finnish, Estonian and Turkish, as well as several Altai and Uralic languages of the European part of Russia.

The Indo-European family of languages includes at least twelve groups of languages. In order of geographical location, moving clockwise from northwestern Europe, these are the following groups: Celtic, Germanic, Baltic, Slavic, Tocharian, Indian, Iranian, Armenian, Hittite-Luvian, Greek, Albanian, Italic (including Latin and the Romance languages derived from it, which are sometimes classified as a separate group). Of these, three groups (Italic, Hittite-Luwian and Tocharian) consist entirely of dead languages.

Indo-Aryan languages (Indian) - a group of related languages dating back to the ancient Indian language. Included (together with the Iranian languages and closely related Dardic languages) in the Indo-Iranian languages, one of the branches of the Indo-European languages. Distributed in South Asia: northern and central India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Maldives, Nepal; outside this region - Romani languages, Domari and Parya (Tajikistan). The total number of speakers is about 1 billion people. (Evaluation, 2007).

Ancient Indian languages.

Ancient Indian language. Indian languages come from dialects of the ancient Indian language, which had two literary forms - Vedic (the language of the sacred “Vedas”) and Sanskrit (created by Brahmin priests in the Ganges valley in the first half - mid-first millennium BC). The ancestors of the Indo-Aryans left the ancestral home of the “Aryan Expanse” at the end of the 3rd - beginning of the 2nd millennium. A language related to Indo-Aryan is reflected in proper names, theonyms and some lexical borrowings in the cuneiform texts of the Mitanni and Hittite states. Indo-Aryan writing in the Brahmi syllabary arose in the 4th and 3rd centuries BC.

The Central Indian period is represented by numerous languages and dialects, which were in use orally and then in written form from the Middle Ages. 1st millennium BC e. Of these, the most archaic is Pali (the language of the Buddhist Canon), followed by Prakrits (more archaic are the Prakrits of the inscriptions) and Apabkhransha (dialects that developed by the mid-1st millennium AD as a result of the development of Prakrits and are a transitional link to the New Indian languages ).

The New Indian period begins after the 10th century. It is represented by approximately three dozen major languages and a large number of dialects, sometimes very different from each other.

In the west and northwest they border with Iranian (Baluchi language, Pashto) and Dardic languages, in the north and northeast - with Tibeto-Burman languages, in the east - with a number of Tibeto-Burman and Mon-Khmer languages, in the south - with Dravidian languages (Telugu, Kannada). In India, the array of Indo-Aryan languages is interspersed with language islands of other linguistic groups (Munda, Mon-Khmer, Dravidian, etc.).

1. Hindi and Urdu (Hindustani) are two varieties of one modern Indian literary language; Urdu is the official language of Pakistan (Capital Islamabad), written in the Arabic alphabet; Hindi (the official language of India (New Delhi) - based on the Old Indian Devanagari script.

2. Bengali (state of India - West Bengal, Bangladesh (Kolkata)).

3. Punjabi (eastern part of Pakistan, Punjab state of India).

4. Lahnda.

5. Sindhi (Pakistan).

6. Rajasthani (northwest India).

7. Gujarati - southwest subgroup.

8. Marathi - Western subgroup.

9. Sinhala is an insular subgroup.

10. Nepali - Nepal (Kathmandu) - central subgroup.

11. Bihari - Indian state of Bihar - eastern subgroup.

12. Oriya - Indian state of Orissa - eastern subgroup.

13. Assamese - ind. State of Assam, Bangladesh, Bhutan (Thimphu) - eastern. subgroup.

14. Gypsy.

15. Kashmiri - Indian states of Jammu and Kashmir, Pakistan - Dardic group.

16. Vedic is the language of the most ancient sacred books of the Indians - the Vedas, which were formed in the first half of the second millennium BC.

17. Sanskrit is the literary language of the ancient Indians from the 3rd century BC. to 4th century AD

18. Pali - Central Indian literary and cult language of the medieval era.

19. Prakrits - various colloquial Central Indian dialects.

Iranian languages- a group of related languages within the Aryan branch of the Indo-European family of languages. Distributed mainly in the Middle East, Central Asia and Pakistan.

The Iranian group was formed, according to the generally accepted version, as a result of the separation of languages from the Indo-Iranian branch in the Volga region and southern Urals during the period of the Andronovo culture. There is also another version of the formation of Iranian languages, according to which they separated from the main body of Indo-Iranian languages on the territory of the BMAC culture. The expansion of the Aryans in ancient times took place to the south and southeast. As a result of migrations, Iranian languages spread to the 5th century BC. in large areas from the Northern Black Sea region to Eastern Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Altai (Pazyryk culture), and from the Zagros mountains, eastern Mesopotamia and Azerbaijan to the Hindu Kush.

The most important milestone in the development of Iranian languages was the identification of Western Iranian languages, which spread west from Dasht-e-Kevir across the Iranian plateau, and the Eastern Iranian languages contrasted with them. The work of the Persian poet Ferdowsi Shahnameh reflects the confrontation between the ancient Persians and the nomadic (also semi-nomadic) Eastern Iranian tribes, nicknamed Turanians by the Persians, and their habitat Turan.

In the II - I centuries. BC. The Great Central Asian Migration of Peoples takes place, as a result of which eastern Iranians populate the Pamirs, Xinjiang, Indian lands south of the Hindu Kush, and invade Sistan.

As a result of the expansion of Turkic-speaking nomads from the first half of the 1st millennium AD. Iranian languages begin to be replaced by Turkic languages, first in the Great Steppe, and with the beginning of the 2nd millennium in Central Asia, Xinjiang, Azerbaijan and a number of regions of Iran. What remained from the steppe Iranian world was the relict Ossetian language (a descendant of the Alan-Sarmatian language) in the Caucasus mountains, as well as the descendants of the Saka languages, the languages of the Pashtun tribes and the Pamir peoples.

The current state of the Iranian-speaking massif was largely determined by the expansion of Western Iranian languages, which began under the Sassanids, but gained full strength after the Arab invasion:

The spread of the Persian language throughout the entire territory of Iran, Afghanistan and the south of Central Asia and the massive displacement of local Iranian and sometimes non-Iranian languages in the corresponding territories, as a result of which the modern Persian and Tajik communities were formed.

Expansion of the Kurds into Upper Mesopotamia and the Armenian Highlands.

Migration of the semi-nomads of Gorgan to the southeast and the formation of the Balochi language.

Phonetics of Iranian languages shares many similarities with Indo-Aryan languages in development from an Indo-European state. The ancient Iranian languages belong to the inflectional-synthetic type with a developed system of inflectional forms of declension and conjugation and are thus similar to Sanskrit, Latin and Old Church Slavonic. This is especially true of the Avestan language and, to a lesser extent, Old Persian. In Avestan there are eight cases, three numbers, three genders, inflectional-synthetic verbal forms of present, aorist, imperfect, perfect, injunctive, conjunctive, optative, imperative, and there is developed word formation.

1. Persian - writing based on the Arabic alphabet - Iran (Tehran), Afghanistan (Kabul), Tajikistan (Dushanbe) - southwestern Iranian group.

2. Dari is the literary language of Afghanistan.

3. Pashto - since the 30s the state language of Afghanistan - Afghanistan, Pakistan - an Eastern Iranian subgroup.

4. Baluchi - Pakistan, Iran, Afghanistan, Turkmenistan (Ashgabat), Oman (Muscat), UAE (Abu Dhabi) - northwestern subgroup.

5. Tajik - Tajikistan, Afghanistan, Uzbekistan (Tashkent) - Western Iranian subgroup.

6. Kurdish - Turkey (Ankara), Iran, Iraq (Baghdad), Syria (Damascus), Armenia (Yerevan), Lebanon (Beirut) - Western Iranian subgroup.

7. Ossetian - Russia (North Ossetia), South Ossetia (Tskhinvali) - East Iranian subgroup.

8. Tatsky - Russia (Dagestan), Azerbaijan (Baku) - western subgroup.

9. Talysh - Iran, Azerbaijan - northwestern Iranian subgroup.

10. Caspian dialects.

11. Pamir languages - unwritten languages of the Pamirs.

12. Yagnob - the language of the Yagnobis, inhabitants of the Yagnob River valley in Tajikistan.

14. Avestan.

15. Pahlavi.

16. Median.

17. Parthian.

18. Sogdian.

19. Khorezmian.

20. Scythian.

21. Bactrian.

22. Saki.

Slavic group. Slavic languages are a group of related languages of the Indo-European family. Distributed throughout Europe and Asia. The total number of speakers is about 400-500 million [source not specified 101 days]. They are distinguished by a high degree of closeness to each other, which is found in the structure of the word, the use of grammatical categories, sentence structure, semantics, a system of regular sound correspondences, and morphonological alternations. This closeness is explained by the unity of origin of the Slavic languages and their long and intensive contacts with each other at the level of literary languages and dialects.

It has not been established in what territory the separation of the Slavic language continuum from the Indo-European/Balto-Slavic occurred. It can be assumed that it occurred to the south of those territories that, according to various theories, belong to the territory of the Slavic ancestral homelands. From one of the Indo-European dialects (Proto-Slavic), the Proto-Slavic language was formed, which is the ancestor of all modern Slavic languages. The history of the Proto-Slavic language was longer than the history of individual Slavic languages.

For a long time it developed as a single dialect with an identical structure. Dialectal variants arose later. The process of transition of the Proto-Slavic language into independent languages took place most actively in the 2nd half of the 1st millennium AD. e., during the period of formation of the early Slavic states in the territory of South-Eastern and Eastern Europe. During this period, the territory of Slavic settlements increased significantly. Areas of various geographical zones with different natural and climatic conditions were developed, the Slavs entered into relationships with the population of these territories, standing at different stages of cultural development. All this was reflected in the history of Slavic languages.

The history of the Proto-Slavic language is divided into 3 periods: the oldest - before the establishment of close Balto-Slavic linguistic contact, the period of the Balto-Slavic community and the period of dialect fragmentation and the beginning of the formation of independent Slavic languages.

Eastern subgroup:

1. Russian.

2. Ukrainian.

3. Belarusian.

Southern subgroup:

1. Bulgarian - Bulgaria (Sofia).

2. Macedonian - Macedonia (Skopje).

3. Serbo-Croatian - Serbia (Belgrade), Croatia (Zagreb).

4. Slovenian - Slovenia (Ljubljana).

Western subgroup:

1. Czech - Czech Republic (Prague).

2. Slovak - Slovakia (Bratislava).

3. Polish - Poland (Warsaw).

4. Kashubian is a dialect of Polish.

5. Lusatian - Germany.

Dead: Old Church Slavonic, Polabian, Pomeranian.

Baltic group.

The Baltic languages are a language group that represents a special branch of the Indo-European group of languages.

The total number of speakers is over 4.5 million people. Distribution: Latvia, Lithuania, formerly the territories of (modern) northeastern Poland, Russia (Kaliningrad region) and northwestern Belarus; even earlier (before the 7th-9th, in some places the 12th centuries) up to the upper reaches of the Volga, the Oka basin, the middle Dnieper and Pripyat.

According to one theory, the Baltic languages are not a genetic formation, but the result of early convergence [source not specified 374 days]. The group includes 2 living languages (Latvian and Lithuanian; sometimes the Latgalian language is distinguished separately, officially considered a dialect of Latvian); the Prussian language, attested in monuments, which became extinct in the 17th century; at least 5 languages known only by toponymy and onomastics (Curonian, Yatvingian, Galindian/Golyadian, Zemgalian and Selonian).

1. Lithuanian - Lithuania (Vilnius).

2. Latvian - Latvia (Riga).

3. Latgalian - Latvia.

Dead: Prussian, Yatvyazhsky, Kurzhsky, etc.

German group.

The history of the development of Germanic languages is usually divided into 3 periods:

Ancient (from the emergence of writing to the 11th century) - the formation of individual languages;

Middle (XII-XV centuries) - development of writing in Germanic languages and expansion of their social functions;

New (from the 16th century to the present) - the formation and normalization of national languages.

In the reconstructed Proto-Germanic language, a number of researchers identify a layer of vocabulary that does not have an Indo-European etymology - the so-called pre-Germanic substrate. In particular, these are the majority of strong verbs, the conjugation paradigm of which also cannot be explained from the Proto-Indo-European language. The shift of consonants compared to the Proto-Indo-European language is the so-called. “Grimm’s law” - supporters of the hypothesis also explain the influence of the substrate.

The development of Germanic languages from antiquity to the present day is associated with numerous migrations of their speakers. Germanic dialects of ancient times were divided into 2 main groups: Scandinavian (northern) and continental (southern). In the II-I centuries BC. e. Some tribes from Scandinavia moved to the southern coast of the Baltic Sea and formed an East German group opposing the West German (formerly southern) group. The East German tribe of the Goths, moving south, penetrated the territory of the Roman Empire right up to the Iberian Peninsula, where they mixed with the local population (V-VIII centuries).

Scandinavian dialects after their isolation in the 5th century. from the continental group were divided into eastern and western subgroups; on the basis of the first, Swedish, Danish and Old Gutnic languages were later formed, on the basis of the second - Norwegian, as well as the island languages - Icelandic, Faroese and Norn.

The formation of national literary languages was completed in England in the 16th-17th centuries, in the Scandinavian countries in the 16th century, in Germany in the 18th century. The spread of the English language beyond England led to the creation of its variants in the USA, Canada, and Australia. The German language in Austria is represented by its Austrian variant.

North German subgroup:

1. Danish - Denmark (Copenhagen), northern Germany.

2. Swedish - Sweden (Stockholm), Finland (Helsinki) - contact subgroup.

3. Norwegian - Norway (Oslo) - continental subgroup.

4. Icelandic - Iceland (Reykjavik), Denmark.

5. Faroese - Denmark.

West German subgroup:

1. English - UK, USA, India, Australia (Canberra), Canada (Ottawa), Ireland (Dublin), New Zealand (Wellington).

2. Dutch - Netherlands (Amsterdam), Belgium (Brussels), Suriname (Paramaribo), Aruba.

3. Frisian - Netherlands, Denmark, Germany.

4. German - Low German and High German - Germany, Austria (Vienna), Switzerland (Bern), Liechtenstein (Vaduz), Belgium, Italy, Luxembourg.

5. Yiddish - Israel (Jerusalem).

East German subgroup:

1. Gothic - Visigothic and Ostrogothic.

2. Burgundian, Vandal, Gepid, Herulian.

Roman group. Romance languages (Latin Roma "Rome") are a group of languages and dialects that are part of the Italic branch of the Indo-European language family and genetically go back to a common ancestor - Latin. The name Romanesque comes from the Latin word romanus (Roman). The science that studies Romance languages, their origin, development, classification, etc. is called Romance studies and is one of the subsections of linguistics (linguistics).

The peoples who speak them are also called Romanesque. The Romance languages developed as a result of the divergent (centrifugal) development of the oral tradition of different geographical dialects of the once united vernacular Latin language and gradually became isolated from the source language and from each other as a result of various demographic, historical and geographical processes.

The beginning of this epoch-making process was laid by Roman colonists who settled regions (provinces) of the Roman Empire remote from the capital - Rome - during a complex ethnographic process called ancient Romanization in the period of the 3rd century. BC e. - 5th century n. e. During this period, the various dialects of Latin are influenced by the substrate.

For a long time, Romance languages were perceived only as vernacular dialects of the classical Latin language, and therefore were practically not used in writing. The formation of the literary forms of the Romance languages was largely based on the traditions of classical Latin, which allowed them to become closer again in lexical and semantic terms in modern times.

1. French - France (Paris), Canada, Belgium (Brussels), Switzerland, Lebanon (Beirut), Luxembourg, Monaco, Morocco (Rabat).

2. Provencal - France, Italy, Spain, Monaco.

3. Italian - Italy, San Marino, Vatican, Switzerland.

4. Sardinian - Sardinia (Greece).

5. Spanish - Spain, Argentina (Buenos Aires), Cuba (Havana), Mexico (Mexico City), Chile (Santiago), Honduras (Tegucigalpa).

6. Galician - Spain, Portugal (Lisbon).

7. Catalan - Spain, France, Italy, Andorra (Andorra la Vella).

8. Portuguese - Portugal, Brazil (Brasilia), Angola (Luanda), Mozambique (Maputo).

9. Romanian - Romania (Bucharest), Moldova (Chisinau).

10. Moldavian - Moldova.

11. Macedonian-Romanian - Greece, Albania (Tirana), Macedonia (Skopje), Romania, Bulgarian.

12. Romansh - Switzerland.

13. Creole languages are crossed Romance languages with local languages.

Italian:

1. Latin.

2. Medieval Vulgar Latin.

3. Oscian, Umbrian, Sabelian.

Celtic group. Celtic languages are one of the western groups of the Indo-European family, close, in particular, to the Italic and Germanic languages. Nevertheless, the Celtic languages, apparently, did not form a specific unity with other groups, as was sometimes previously thought (in particular, the hypothesis of Celto-Italic unity, defended by A. Meillet, is most likely incorrect).

We know relatively little about the ancient stages of development of the Celtic languages: the monuments of that era are very scarce and not always easy to interpret; nevertheless, data from the Celtic languages (especially Old Irish) play an important role in the reconstruction of the Indo-European proto-language.

Goidelic subgroup:

1. Irish - Ireland.

2. Scottish - Scotland (Edinburgh).

3. Manx is a dead language of the Isle of Man (in the Irish Sea).

Brythonic subgroup:

1. Breton - Brittany (France).

2. Welsh - Wales (Cardiff).

3. Cornish - dead - on Cornwall - the peninsula of southwestern England.

Gallic subgroup:

1. Gaulish - died out from the era of the formation of the French language; was distributed in Gaul, Northern Italy, the Balkans and Asia Minor

Currently, the main representative of the group with a full range of linguistic functions is the Greek language of Greece and Cyprus, which has a long and complex history. The presence of a single full representative in our days brings the Greek group closer to the Albanian and Armenian, which are also actually represented by one language each.

At the same time, there were previously other Greek languages and extremely separate dialects that either became extinct or are on the verge of extinction as a result of assimilation.

1. Modern Greek - Greece (Athens), Cyprus (Nicosia)

2. Ancient Greek

3. Middle Greek, or Byzantine

Albanian group:

Albanian language (Alb. Gjuha shqipe) is the language of the Albanians, the indigenous population of Albania proper and part of the population of Greece, Macedonia, Kosovo, Montenegro, Lower Italy and Sicily. The number of speakers is about 6 million people.

The self-name of the language - “shkip” - comes from the local word “shipe” or “shkipe”, which actually means “rocky soil” or “rock”. That is, the self-name of the language can be translated as “mountain”. The word "shkip" can also be interpreted as "understandable" (language).

Armenian group:

Being a branch of the Indo-European language, Armenian subsequently came into contact with various Indo-European and non-Indo-European languages - both living and now dead, taking over from them and bringing to the present day much of what direct written evidence could not preserve. At different times, Hittite and hieroglyphic Luwian, Hurrian and Urartian, Akkadian, Aramaic and Syriac, Parthian and Persian, Georgian and Zan, Greek and Latin came into contact with the Armenian language.

For the history of these languages and their speakers, data from the Armenian language are in many cases of paramount importance. This data is especially important for urartologists, Iranianists, and Kartvelists, who draw many facts about the history of the languages they study from Armenian.

Hittite-Luwian group. Anatolian languages are a branch of the Indo-European languages (also known as the Hittite-Luwian languages). According to glottochronology, they separated from other Indo-European languages quite early. All languages in this group are dead. Their carriers lived in the 2nd-1st millennium BC. e. on the territory of Asia Minor (the Hittite kingdom and the small states that arose on its territory), were later conquered and assimilated by the Persians and/or Greeks.

The oldest monuments of Anatolian languages are Hittite cuneiform and Luwian hieroglyphics (there were also short inscriptions in Palayan, the most archaic of the Anatolian languages). Through the works of the Czech linguist Friedrich (Bedrich) the Terrible, these languages were identified as Indo-European, which contributed to their decipherment.

Later inscriptions in Lydian, Lycian, Sidetian, Carian and other languages were written in Asia Minor alphabets (partially deciphered in the 20th century).

Dead:

1. Hittite.

2. Luuvian.

3. Palaysky.

4. Carian.

5. Lydian.

6. Lycian.

Tocharian group. Tocharian languages are a group of Indo-European languages consisting of the dead "Tocharian A" ("East Tocharian") and "Tocharian B" ("West Tocharian"). They were spoken in what is now Xinjiang. The monuments that have reached us (the first of them were discovered at the beginning of the 20th century by the Hungarian traveler Aurel Stein) date back to the 6th-8th centuries. The self-name of the speakers is unknown; they are called “Tochars” conventionally: the Greeks called them Τοχ?ριοι, and the Turks called them toxri.

Dead:

1. Tocharian A - in Chinese Turkestan.

2. Tocharsky V - ibid.

Indo-European family consists of Indian group, Iranian group, Slavic group (divided into Eastern subgroup, Western, Southern), Baltic group, Germanic group (divided into Northern or Scandinavian subgroup, Western, Eastern or East Germanic), Romanesque group, Celtic group, Greek Indian group group, Hindi, Urdu, Romani, Bengali (dead - Vedic, Sonskrit, Pali, Prakrit).

Iranian group, Persian (Farsi), Afghan (Pashto), Tajik, Ossetian (dead - Old Persian, Avestan, Khorezmian, Scythian).

Slavic group. Eastern subgroup (Russian, Belarusian, Ukrainian). Western subgroup (Polish, Czech, Slovak, Lusatian), dead - Popabian, Pomfian dialects. Southern subgroup (Bulgarian, Serbo-Croatian; Macedonian, Slovenian), dead - Old Church Slavonic.

Baltic group. Latvian, Lithuanian (dead - Prussian).

German group. Northern (Scandinavian) subgroup (Swedish, Norwegian, Danish, Icelandic, Faroese). Western subgroup (English, German, Frisian, Yiddish, Afrikaans). Eastern (East Germanic) subgroup, only dead ones - Gothic (divided into Visigothic and Ostrogothic), Burgunian.

Roman group, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Moldovan, Romanian, Macedonian-Romanian, Romansh, Provençal, Sardinian, Galician, Catalan, Dead - Latin, Medieval Vulgar Latin. Celtic group, Irish, Scottish, Welsh (Welsh), Cornish, Breton.

Greek group, only the dead - Ancient Greek, Central Greek, Modern Greek.

Albanian group- Albanian.

Armenian group- Armenian.

Analytical languages- this is the name the brothers Friedrich and August Schlegel gave to the new Indo-European languages in their classification of languages.

In the ancient world, most languages were of a strong synthetic nature, for example. language Greek, Latin, Sanskrit, etc. From the history of the development of languages, it is clear that all languages tend to acquire an analytical character over time: with each new era, the number of characteristic features of the analytical class increases.

The new Indo-European languages experienced significant simplifications in their grammatical systems. Instead of a large number of forms, replete with all sorts of anomalies, simpler and more standard forms appeared.

Comparing old Indo-European languages with new ones, O. Jespersen (Danish linguist) found a number of advantages in the grammatical structure of the latter. The forms have become shorter, which requires less muscular tension and time to pronounce them, there are fewer of them, the memory is not overloaded with them, their formation has become more regular, the syntactic use of forms reveals fewer anomalies, the more analytical and abstract nature of the forms facilitates their expression, allowing for the possibility of multiple combinations and constructions that were previously impossible, the cumbersome repetition known as agreement has disappeared, a fixed word order ensures clarity and unambiguity of understanding.

The so-called synthetic structure characteristic of ancient Indo-European languages (where grammatical meanings are expressed within the word itself, affixation, internal inflection, stress) in many modern Indo-European languages has been replaced by an analytical structure (grammatical meanings are mainly expressed outside the word, about the sentence, the order of the layer in the sentence , official words, intonation). O. Jespersen argued that these processes mean the victory of a higher and more perfect linguistic form. Independent particles, function words (prepositions, auxiliary verbs), in his opinion, are a higher technical means of expressing thought than the old inflection.

New languages took on an analytical character; The language that has moved the most among the European languages in this direction is English, which has left only small remnants of declensions and conjugations. There are almost no declensions in the French language, but there are still conjugations there, which are also quite strongly developed in the German language, where the declination is preserved in a wider range than in the Romance languages. However, two groups of new languages differ from all of them: Slavic and Baltic. Synthetic features still predominate here.

5. Macrocomparative studies. Macrofamilies of the world's languages (Nostratic, Sino-Caucasian, Amerindian, etc.). Macrocomparative studies * theory of distant kinship of languages.

Currently, discussions on the issue of distant relationships between languages (macrocomparative studies) are beginning to play an increasingly important role in comparative studies. The successful development and application of the comparative historical method has led to the fact that the vast majority of taxonomic units have already been identified, and attempts to deepen comparisons seem quite natural. The determination of linguistic kinship, in principle, does not depend on the time of decay of the proto-language. It is clear, however, that with very small proportions of matches (that is, with very distant relationships), it is difficult to establish regular matches in comparisons.

The scientific stage of development of the Nostratic theory began in the 60s with a series of articles by our scientists - V.M. Illich-Svitych and A.B. Dolgopolsky. Illich-Svitych established a detailed system of correspondences between the proto-languages of six language families of the Old World - Semitic-Hamitic, Kartvelian, Indo-European, Uralic, Dravidian and Altaic. According to generally accepted opinion, the main core of the Nostratic family is the Indo-European, Uralic and Altaic languages. Particularly indicative is the similarity of pronominal systems, as well as a large number of parallels in the basic vocabulary.

Another macrofamily, the existence of which was revealed by S.A. Starostin - the so-called Sino-Caucasian. The Sino-Caucasian hypothesis assumes the existence of an ancient genetic relationship between rather geographically distant language families: North Caucasian, Yenisei and Sino-Tibetan. Here, too, a rather complex system of correspondences was established and a large number of parallels were discovered in the basic vocabulary. It is possible that before the speakers of Nostratic languages settled throughout Eurasia, Sino-Caucasian languages were much more widespread. The Sino-Caucasian hypothesis is still at the beginning of its development, but this direction seems very promising.

Hypotheses about the existence of other macrofamilies have been developed to an even lesser extent.

The Austrian hypothesis suggests affinities between Austronesian, Austroasiatic, Thai, and Miao Yao languages. There are a number of parallels between these language families in the area of basic vocabulary.

The Khoisan macrofamily includes all African languages that have special clicking sounds (“kliks”) and which do not belong to other language families, i.e., the languages of the Bushmen, Hottentots, and also, possibly, San-Dawe, Hadza and the (extinct) quadi.

There are also a number of assumptions by J. Greenberg (American linguist) regarding the existence of other macro-families: Amerindian, Nilo-Saharan, Niger-Kordofanian and Indo-Pacific. However, unlike the hypotheses that I have already mentioned, these assumptions are based mainly on the “mass comparison” method, and therefore are still much more hypothetical.

The Amerindian hypothesis assumes the kinship of all languages of the American aborigines, except for the Dene languages (Indian languages of North America) and Eskimo-Aleut (Arctic belt of North America). This hypothesis does not have a sufficiently strict linguistic justification, but correlates well with anthropological data. In addition, some similarities in grammar are found between the Amerind languages.

The Niger-Kordofanian family includes African languages that have concordant classes, while the Nilo-Saharan family includes other African languages that are not included in either the Afroasiatic, Khoisan, or Niger-Kordofanian macrofamilies. A hypothesis has been expressed about the special closeness of the Sahrawi languages to the Afroasiatic ones.

It has been suggested that all Australian languages are related (Australian macrofamily). Almost all other languages of the world are united by J. Greenberg into the Indo-Pacific macrofamily (this hypothesis, apparently, is the least substantiated).

The chronological depth of each of these families is about 11-13 thousand years. The proto-language to which they all go back dates back to approximately 13-15 millennia BC. Naki;.,.enough material to obtain a detailed picture of the formation and settlement of most ethnic groups of Eurasia and North America.

The largest unit of classification of peoples (ethnic groups) on the basis of their linguistic kinship, the common origin of their languages from the presumed base language. Language families are divided into language groups. The largest in number is... ... Financial Dictionary

The largest unit of classification of peoples based on linguistic proximity. The biggest I" p. Indo-European, the languages of this family are used by 2.5 billion people. It includes Romance, Germanic, Slavic and other language groups. In the second... ... Geographical encyclopedia

Indo-Germanic language family- 1. name, previously used instead of the international term “Indo-European family of languages”; sometimes still used in it. linguistics. 2. In addition to approximately 15 languages and groups of languages, it also includes Greek. and lat... Dictionary of Antiquity

Indo-European Taxon: family Homeland: Indo-European areas Centum (blue) and Satem (red). The presumed source area of satemization is shown in bright red. Habitat: the whole world... Wikipedia

Linguistic taxonomy is an auxiliary discipline that helps to organize the objects studied by linguistics: languages, dialects and groups of languages. The result of this ordering is also called the taxonomy of languages. The basis of taxonomy... ... Wikipedia

The Indo-European family of languages includes at least twelve groups of languages. In order of geographical location, moving clockwise from northwestern Europe, these groups are: Celtic, Germanic, Baltic, Slavic, Tocharian, Indian, Iranian, Armenian, Hittite-Luvian, Greek, Albanian, Italic (including Latin and originating from not Romance languages, which are sometimes classified as a separate group). Of these, three groups (Italic, Hittite-Luwian and Tocharian) consist entirely of dead languages.

Ancient Indian language. Indian languages come from dialects of the ancient Indian language, which had two literary forms - Vedic (the language of the sacred “Vedas”) and Sanskrit (created by Brahmin priests in the Ganges valley in the first half - mid-first millennium BC). The ancestors of the Indo-Aryans left the ancestral home of the “Aryan Expanse” at the end of the 3rd – beginning of the 2nd millennium. A language related to Indo-Aryan is reflected in proper names, theonyms and some lexical borrowings in the cuneiform texts of the Mitanni and Hittite states. Indo-Aryan writing in the Brahmi syllabary arose in the 4th and 3rd centuries BC.

The New Indian period begins after the 10th century. It is represented by approximately three dozen major languages and a large number of dialects, sometimes very different from each other.

2. Bengali (Indian state - West Bengal, Bangladesh (Kolkata))

3. Punjabi (eastern part of Pakistan, Punjab state of India)

5. Sindhi (Pakistan)

6. Rajasthani (northwest India)

7. Gujarati – southwest subgroup

8. Marathi - Western subgroup

9. Sinhala – insular subgroup

10. Nepali – Nepal (Kathmandu) – central subgroup

11. Bihari – Indian state of Bihar – eastern subgroup

12. Oriya - Indian state of Orissa - eastern subgroup

13. Assamese – ind. State of Assam, Bangladesh, Bhutan (Thimphu) - eastern. subgroup

14. Gypsy –

15. Kashmiri - Indian states of Jammu and Kashmir, Pakistan - Dardic group

16. Vedic is the language of the most ancient sacred books of the Indians - the Vedas, which were formed in the first half of the second millennium BC.

17. Sanskrit is the literary language of the ancient Indians from the 3rd century BC. to 4th century AD

18. Pali - Central Indian literary and cult language of the medieval era

19. Prakrits - various colloquial Central Indian dialects

Iranian languages- a group of related languages within the Aryan branch of the Indo-European family of languages. Distributed mainly in the Middle East, Central Asia and Pakistan.

Expansion of the Kurds into Upper Mesopotamia and the Armenian Highlands.

Migration of the semi-nomads of Gorgan to the southeast and the formation of the Balochi language.

1. Persian - writing based on the Arabic alphabet - Iran (Tehran), Afghanistan (Kabul), Tajikistan (Dushanbe) - southwestern Iranian group.

2. Dari - the literary language of Afghanistan

3. Pashto - since the 30s the state language of Afghanistan - Afghanistan, Pakistan - Eastern Iranian subgroup

4. Baluchi - Pakistan, Iran, Afghanistan, Turkmenistan (Ashgabat), Oman (Muscat), UAE (Abu Dhabi) - northwestern subgroup.

5. Tajik - Tajikistan, Afghanistan, Uzbekistan (Tashkent) - Western Iranian subgroup.

6. Kurdish - Turkey (Ankara), Iran, Iraq (Baghdad), Syria (Damascus), Armenia (Yerevan), Lebanon (Beirut) - Western Iranian subgroup.

7. Ossetian - Russia (North Ossetia), South Ossetia (Tskhinvali) - East Iranian subgroup

8. Tatsky – Russia (Dagestan), Azerbaijan (Baku) – western subgroup

9. Talysh - Iran, Azerbaijan - northwestern Iranian subgroup

10. Caspian dialects

11. Pamir languages – unwritten languages of the Pamirs.

12. Yagnobian is the language of the Yagnobi people, inhabitants of the Yagnob River valley in Tajikistan.

14. Avestan

15. Pahlavi

16. Median

17. Parthian

18. Sogdian

19. Khorezmian

20. Scythian

21. Bactrian

22. Saki

The long-term independent development of the Slavic peoples in different ethnic, geographical, historical and cultural conditions, their contacts with various ethnic groups led to the emergence of differences in material, functional, etc. Slavic languages within the Indo-European family are most similar to the Baltic languages. The similarities between the two groups served as the basis for the theory of the “Balto-Slavic proto-language”, according to which the Balto-Slavic proto-language first emerged from the Indo-European proto-language, which later split into Proto-Baltic and Proto-Slavic. However, many scientists explain their special closeness by the long-term contact of the ancient Balts and Slavs, and deny the existence of the Balto-Slavic language. It has not been established in what territory the separation of the Slavic language continuum from the Indo-European/Balto-Slavic occurred. It can be assumed that it occurred to the south of those territories that, according to various theories, belong to the territory of the Slavic ancestral homelands. From one of the Indo-European dialects (Proto-Slavic), the Proto-Slavic language was formed, which is the ancestor of all modern Slavic languages. The history of the Proto-Slavic language was longer than the history of individual Slavic languages. For a long time it developed as a single dialect with an identical structure. Dialectal variants arose later. The process of transition of the Proto-Slavic language into independent languages took place most actively in the 2nd half of the 1st millennium AD. e., during the period of formation of the early Slavic states in the territory of South-Eastern and Eastern Europe. During this period, the territory of Slavic settlements increased significantly. Areas of various geographical zones with different natural and climatic conditions were developed, the Slavs entered into relationships with the population of these territories, standing at different stages of cultural development. All this was reflected in the history of Slavic languages.

Eastern subgroup

1. Russian

2. Ukrainian

3. Belarusian

Southern subgroup

1. Bulgarian – Bulgaria (Sofia)

2. Macedonian - Macedonia (Skopje)

3. Serbo-Croatian - Serbia (Belgrade), Croatia (Zagreb)

4. Slovenian – Slovenia (Ljubljana)

Western subgroup

1. Czech – Czech Republic (Prague)

2. Slovak - Slovakia (Bratislava)

3. Polish – Poland (Warsaw)

4. Kashubian - a dialect of Polish

5. Lusatian - Germany

Dead: Old Church Slavonic, Polabian, Pomeranian

Baltic group. The Baltic languages are a language group that represents a special branch of the Indo-European group of languages.

The total number of speakers is over 4.5 million people. Distribution - Latvia, Lithuania, formerly the territories of (modern) northeastern Poland, Russia (Kaliningrad region) and northwestern Belarus; even earlier (before the 7th-9th, in some places the 12th centuries) up to the upper reaches of the Volga, the Oka basin, the middle Dnieper and Pripyat.

1. Lithuanian – Lithuania (Vilnius)

2. Latvian – Latvia (Riga)

3. Latgalian – Latvia

Dead: Prussian, Yatvyazhsky, Kurzhsky, etc.

German group. The history of the development of Germanic languages is usually divided into 3 periods:

· ancient (from the emergence of writing to the 11th century) - the formation of individual languages;

· middle (XII-XV centuries) - development of writing in Germanic languages and expansion of their social functions;

· new (from the 16th century to the present) - the formation and normalization of national languages.

In the reconstructed Proto-Germanic language, a number of researchers identify a layer of vocabulary that does not have an Indo-European etymology - the so-called pre-Germanic substrate. In particular, these are the majority of strong verbs, the conjugation paradigm of which also cannot be explained from the Proto-Indo-European language. The shift of consonants compared to the Proto-Indo-European language is the so-called. “Grimm's law” - supporters of the hypothesis also explain the influence of the substrate.

Within the West Germanic area in the 1st century AD. e. 3 groups of tribal dialects were distinguished: Ingveonian, Istveonian and Erminonian. The resettlement in the 5th-6th centuries of part of the Ingvaean tribes (Angles, Saxons, Jutes) to the British Isles predetermined the further development of the English language. The complex interaction of West Germanic dialects on the continent created the preconditions for the formation of the Old Frisian, Old Saxon, Old Low Frankish and Old High German languages. Scandinavian dialects after their isolation in the 5th century. from the continental group they were divided into eastern and western subgroups; on the basis of the first, Swedish, Danish and Old Gutnic languages were later formed, on the basis of the second - Norwegian, as well as the island languages - Icelandic, Faroese and Norn.

North German subgroup.

1. Danish – Denmark (Copenhagen), northern Germany

2. Swedish – Sweden (Stockholm), Finland (Helsinki) – contact subgroup

3. Norwegian – Norway (Oslo) – continental subgroup

4. Icelandic – Iceland (Reykjavik), Denmark

5. Faroese - Denmark

West German subgroup

1. English – UK, USA, India, Australia (Canberra), Canada (Ottawa), Ireland (Dublin), New Zealand (Wellington)

2. Dutch – Netherlands (Amsterdam), Belgium (Brussels), Suriname (Paramaribo), Aruba

3. Frisian - Netherlands, Denmark, Germany

4. German – Low German and High German – Germany, Austria (Vienna), Switzerland (Bern), Liechtenstein (Vaduz), Belgium, Italy, Luxembourg

5. Yiddish – Israel (Jerusalem)

East German subgroup

1. Gothic – Visigothic and Ostrogothic

2. Burgundian, Vandal, Gepid, Herulian

Roman group. Romance languages (Latin Roma “Rome”) are a group of languages and dialects that are part of the Italic branch of the Indo-European language family and genetically go back to a common ancestor - Latin. The name Romanesque comes from the Latin word romanus (Roman). The science that studies Romance languages, their origin, development, classification, etc. is called Romance studies and is one of the subsections of linguistics (linguistics). The peoples who speak them are also called Romanesque. The Romance languages developed as a result of the divergent (centrifugal) development of the oral tradition of different geographical dialects of the once united vernacular Latin language and gradually became isolated from the source language and from each other as a result of various demographic, historical and geographical processes. The beginning of this epoch-making process was laid by Roman colonists who settled regions (provinces) of the Roman Empire remote from the capital - Rome - during a complex ethnographic process called ancient Romanization in the period of the 3rd century. BC e. - 5th century n. e. During this period, the various dialects of Latin were influenced by the substrate. For a long time, the Romance languages were perceived only as vernacular dialects of the classical Latin language, and therefore were practically not used in writing. The formation of the literary forms of the Romance languages was largely based on the traditions of classical Latin, which allowed them to become closer again in lexical and semantic terms in modern times.

1. French - France (Paris), Canada, Belgium (Brussels), Switzerland, Lebanon (Beirut), Luxembourg, Monaco, Morocco (Rabat).

2. Provençal – France, Italy, Spain, Monaco

3. Italian – Italy, San Marino, Vatican, Switzerland

4. Sardinian – Sardinia (Greece)

5. Spanish – Spain, Argentina (Buenos Aires), Cuba (Havana), Mexico (Mexico City), Chile (Santiago), Honduras (Tegucigalpa)

6. Galician – Spain, Portugal (Lisbon)

7. Catalan – Spain, France, Italy, Andorra (Andorra la Vella)

8. Portuguese – Portugal, Brazil (Brasilia), Angola (Luanda), Mozambique (Maputo)

9. Romanian – Romania (Bucharest), Moldova (Chisinau)

10. Moldavian – Moldova

11. Macedonian-Romanian – Greece, Albania (Tirana), Macedonia (Skopje), Romania, Bulgarian

12. Romansh – Switzerland

13. Creole languages – crossed Romance languages with local languages

Italian:

1. Latin

2. Medieval Vulgar Latin

3. Oscian, Umbrian, Sabelian

The spread of Celtic languages, as well as Celtic peoples, in Europe is associated with the spread of Hallstatt (VI-V centuries BC) and then La Tène (2nd half of the 1st millennium BC) archaeological cultures. The ancestral home of the Celts is probably localized in Central Europe, between the Rhine and the Danube, but they settled very widely: in the 1st half of the 1st millennium BC. e. they entered the British Isles around the 7th century. BC e. - to Gaul, in the 6th century. BC e. - to the Iberian Peninsula, in the 5th century. BC e. they spread to the south, cross the Alps and come to Northern Italy, finally, by the 3rd century. BC e. they reach Greece and Asia Minor. We know relatively little about the ancient stages of development of the Celtic languages: the monuments of that era are very scarce and not always easy to interpret; nevertheless, data from the Celtic languages (especially Old Irish) play an important role in the reconstruction of the Indo-European proto-language.

Goidelic subgroup

1. Irish – Ireland

2. Scottish – Scotland (Edinburgh)

3. Manx – dead – language of the Isle of Man (in the Irish Sea)

Brythonic subgroup

1. Breton - Brittany (France)

2. Welsh – Wales (Cardiff)

3. Cornish - dead - on Cornwall - peninsula southwest of England

Gallic subgroup

1. Gaulish - died out from the era of the formation of the French language; was distributed in Gaul, Northern Italy, the Balkans and Asia Minor

Greek group. The Greek group is currently one of the most unique and relatively small language groups (families) within the Indo-European languages. At the same time, the Greek group is one of the most ancient and well-studied since antiquity. Currently, the main representative of the group with a full range of linguistic functions is the Greek language of Greece and Cyprus, which has a long and complex history. The presence of a single full representative in our days brings the Greek group closer to the Albanian and Armenian, which are also actually represented by one language each.

At the same time, there were previously other Greek languages and extremely separate dialects that either became extinct or are on the verge of extinction as a result of assimilation.

1. Modern Greek – Greece (Athens), Cyprus (Nicosia)

2. ancient Greek

3. Central Greek, or Byzantine

Albanian group.

Armenian group.

The Armenian language is an Indo-European language, usually classified as a separate group, less often combined with Greek and Phrygian languages. Among the Indo-European languages, it is one of the oldest written languages. The Armenian alphabet was created by Mesrop Mashtots in 405-406. n. e. (see Armenian writing). The total number of speakers around the world is about 6.4 million people. During its long history, the Armenian language has been in contact with many languages. Being a branch of the Indo-European language, Armenian subsequently came into contact with various Indo-European and non-Indo-European languages - both living and now dead, taking over from them and bringing to the present day much of what direct written evidence could not preserve. At different times, Hittite and hieroglyphic Luwian, Hurrian and Urartian, Akkadian, Aramaic and Syriac, Parthian and Persian, Georgian and Zan, Greek and Latin came into contact with the Armenian language. For the history of these languages and their speakers, data from the Armenian language are in many cases of paramount importance. This data is especially important for urartologists, Iranianists, and Kartvelists, who draw many facts about the history of the languages they study from Armenian.

Later inscriptions in Lydian, Lycian, Sidetian, Carian and other languages were written in Asia Minor alphabets (partially deciphered in the 20th century).

1. Hittite

2. Luuvian

3. Palay

4. Carian

5. Lydian

6. Lycian

Tocharian group. Tocharian languages are a group of Indo-European languages consisting of the dead "Tocharian A" ("East Tocharian") and "Tocharian B" ("West Tocharian"). They were spoken in what is now Xinjiang. The monuments that have reached us (the first of them were discovered at the beginning of the 20th century by the Hungarian traveler Aurel Stein) date back to the 6th-8th centuries. The self-name of the speakers is unknown; they are called “Tocharians” conventionally: the Greeks called them Τοχάριοι, and the Turks called them toxri.

1. Tocharian A - in Chinese Turkestan

2. Tocharsky V - ibid.

53. Main families of languages: Indo-European, Afroasiatic, Finno-Ugric, Turkic, Sino-Tibetan languages.

Indo-European languages. The first language family established through the comparative historical method was the so-called “Indo-European”. After the discovery of Sanskrit, many European scientists - Danish, German, Italian, French, Russian - began to study the details of the relationship of various externally similar languages of Europe and Asia using the method proposed by William Jones. German experts called this large group of languages “Indo-Germanic” and often continue to call it that to this day (this term is not used in other countries).

The individual language groups, or branches, included in the Indo-European family from the very beginning are Indian, or Indo-Aryan; Iranian; Greek, represented by dialects of the Greek language alone (in the history of which the Ancient Greek and Modern Greek periods differ); Italian, which included the Latin language, whose numerous descendants form the modern Romanesque group; Celtic; Germanic; Baltic; Slavic; as well as isolated Indo-European languages - Armenian And Albanian. There are generally recognized similarities between these groups, allowing us to talk about such groups as the Balto-Slavic and Indo-Iranian languages.

At the end of the 19th - beginning of the 20th century. inscriptions in languages were discovered and deciphered Hittite-Luwian, or Anatolian group, including the Hittite language, which shed light on the earliest stage of the history of Indo-European languages (monuments of the 18th–13th centuries BC). The use of materials from Hittite and other Hittite-Luvian languages stimulated a significant revision of systematizing statements about the structure of the Indo-European proto-language, and some scholars even began to use the term “Indo-Hittite” to designate the stage that preceded the separation of the Hittite-Luvian branch, and the term “Indo-European” proposes to retain one or more later stages.

Indo-European also includes Tocharian a group comprising two dead languages spoken in Xinjiang during the 5th–8th centuries. AD (texts in these languages were found at the end of the 19th century); Illyrian group (two dead languages, Illyrian proper and Messapian); a number of other isolated dead languages spoken in the 1st millennium BC. in the Balkans, - Phrygian, Thracian, Venetian And Old Macedonian(the latter was under strong Greek influence); Pelasgian language of the pre-Greek population of Ancient Greece. Without a doubt, there were other Indo-European languages, and perhaps groups of languages that disappeared without a trace.

In terms of the total number of languages included in it, the Indo-European family is inferior to many other language families, but in terms of geographical distribution and the number of speakers it has no equal (even without taking into account those hundreds of millions of people almost all over the world who use English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Russian , Hindi, to a lesser extent German and New Persian as the second).

Afroasiatic languages. The Semitic language family has been recognized for a long time; similarities between Hebrew and Arabic were noticed already in the Middle Ages. The comparative study of Semitic languages began in the 19th century, and archaeological finds in the 20th century. They introduced a lot of significant new information into it. The establishment of affinities between the Semitic family and certain languages of northeast Africa led to the postulation of a Semitic-Hamitic macrofamily; this term is still very common today. A more detailed study of the African members of this group led to the rejection of the idea of some kind of special “Hamitic” linguistic unity, opposed to Semitic, and therefore the name “Afroasiatic” (or “Afroasiatic”) languages, now generally accepted among specialists, was proposed. The significant degree of divergence of the Afroasiatic languages and the very early estimated time of their divergence make this grouping a classic example of a macrofamily. It consists of five or, according to other classifications, six branches; besides Semitic, This Egyptian a branch consisting of the ancient Egyptian language and its successor Coptic, now the cult language of the Coptic church; Cushitic branch (the most famous languages are Somali and Oromo); formerly included in the Cushitic languages Omotskaya branch (a number of languages in southwestern Ethiopia, the largest being Wolamo and Kaffa); Chadian branch (the most significant language is Hausa); And Berber-Libyan a branch also called Berber-Libyan-Guanche, since, according to modern ideas, in addition to the numerous languages and/or dialects of the nomads of North Africa, it also included the languages of the aborigines of the Canary Islands exterminated by Europeans. In terms of the number of languages it includes (more than 300), the Afroasiatic family is one of the largest; the number of speakers of Afroasiatic languages exceeds 250 million people (mainly due to Arabic, Hausa and Amharic; Oromo, Somalia and Hebrew are also quite large). The languages Arabic, ancient Egyptian, Hebrew revived in the form of Hebrew, Ge'ez, as well as the dead Akkadian, Phoenician and Aramaic languages and a number of other Semitic languages currently play or have played an outstanding cultural role in history.

Sino-Tibetan languages. This language family, also called Sino-Tibetan, includes the largest number of native speakers in the world. Chinese language, which together with Dungan forms a separate branch within its composition; other languages, numbering from about 200 to 300 or more, are united in the Tibeto-Burman branch, the internal structure of which is interpreted differently by different researchers. With the greatest confidence in its composition, the Lolo-Burmese groups are distinguished (the largest language is Burmese), Bodo-Garo, Kuki-Chin (the largest language is meithey, or Manipuri in eastern India), Tibetan (the largest language is Tibetan, fragmented into widely differing dialects), Gurung and several groups of so-called “Himalayan” languages (the largest is Newari in Nepal). The total number of speakers of the languages of the Tibeto-Burman branch is over 60 million people, in Chinese – more than 1 billion, and due to it, the Sino-Tibetan family ranks second in the world in terms of the number of speakers after the Indo-European. Chinese, Tibetan and Burmese languages have long written traditions (from the second half of the 2nd millennium BC, 6th century AD and 12th century AD, respectively) and great cultural significance, but most Sino-Tibetan languages remain unwritten. From numerous monuments discovered and deciphered in the 20th century, the dead Tangut language of the Xi-Xia state (10th–13th centuries); there are monuments to a dead language I drink(6th–12th centuries, Burma).

Sino-Tibetan languages have the structural characteristic of using tonal (pitch) differences to distinguish between usually monosyllabic morphemes; there is little or no inflection or any use of affixes at all; syntax relies on phrasal phonology and word order. Some of the Chinese and Tibeto-Burman languages have undergone extensive study, but reconstruction similar to that which has been made for the Indo-European languages has as yet been carried out only to a small extent.

For quite a long time, the Thai and Miao-Yao languages were also brought together with the Sino-Tibetan languages, specifically Chinese, uniting them into a special Sinitic branch, opposed to the Tibeto-Burman one. Currently, this hypothesis has practically no supporters left.

Turkic languages belong to the Altai language family. Turkic languages: about 30 languages, and with dead languages and local varieties, the status of which as languages is not always indisputable, more than 50; the largest are Turkish, Azerbaijani, Uzbek, Kazakh, Uyghur, Tatar; the total number of speakers of Turkic languages is about 120 million people. The center of the Turkic range is Central Asia, from where, in the course of historical migrations, they also spread, on the one hand, to southern Russia, the Caucasus and Asia Minor, and on the other, to the northeast, to eastern Siberia up to Yakutia. The comparative historical study of Altai languages began in the 19th century. Nevertheless, there is no generally accepted reconstruction of the Altaic proto-language; one of the reasons is the intensive contacts of the Altaic languages and numerous mutual borrowings, which complicate the use of standard comparative methods.

Ural languages. This macrofamily consists of two families - Finno-Ugric And Samoyed. Finno-Ugric family, which includes, in particular, the Finnish, Estonian, Izhorian, Karelian, Vepsian, Votic, Livonian, Sami (Baltic-Finnish branch) and Hungarian (Ugric branch, which also includes the Khanty and Mansi languages) languages, was described in general terms at the end of the 19th century; At the same time, the reconstruction of the proto-language was carried out; The Finno-Ugric family also includes the Volga (Mordovian (Erzyan and Moksha) and Mari (mountain and meadow dialects) languages) and Perm (Udmurt, Komi-Permyak and Komi-Zyryan languages) branches. Later, a relationship with the Finno-Ugric Samoyed languages, widespread in the north of Eurasia, was established. The number of Uralic languages is more than 20, if we consider Sami as a single language, and about 40, if we recognize the existence of separate Sami languages, as well as take into account dead languages, known mainly only by name. The total number of peoples speaking Uralic languages is about 25 million people (more than half of them are native speakers of Hungarian and over 20% of Finnish). The minor Baltic-Finnish languages (except Vepsian) are on the verge of extinction, and Votic may have already disappeared; Three of the four Samoyed languages (except Nenets) are also dying out.

54. Typology, morphological classification of languages: inflection and agglutination.

Typology is a linguistic discipline that classifies languages according to external grammatical features. Typologists of the 20th century: Sapir, Uspensky, Polivanov, Khrakovsky.

The Romantics first raised the question of the “type of language.” Their idea was this: the “spirit of the people” can manifest itself in myths, in art, in literature and in language. Hence the natural conclusion is that through language one can know the “spirit of the people.”

Friedrich Schlegel. All languages can be divided into two types: inflectional and affixing. A language is born and remains in the same type.

August-Wilhelm Schlegel. Identified 3 types: inflectional, affixing and amorphous. Inflectional languages: synthetic and analytical.

Wilhelm von Humboldt. Proved that the Chinese language is not amorphous, but isolating. In addition to the three types of languages noted by the Schlegel brothers, Humboldt described a fourth type; the most accepted term for this type is incorporative (the sentence is constructed as a compound word, i.e. unformed root words are agglutinated into one common whole, which will be both a word and a sentence - Chukchi -you-attakaa-nmy-rkyn “I'm fat deer I kill").

August Schleicher. Indicates three types of languages in two capabilities: synthetic and analytical. Isolating, agglutinating, inflective. Isolating - archaic, agglutinating - transitional, inflectional synthetic - the era of prosperity, inflectional - analytical - the era of decline.

Particularly worth mentioning is Fortunatov’s morphological classification. He takes as his starting point the structure of the form of a word and the relationship of its morphological parts. Four types of languages.

The forms of individual words are formed through such a selection of stems and affixes in words, in which the stem either does not represent the so-called inflection at all (internal inflection), or it does not constitute a necessary accessory to the forms of words and serves to form forms separate from those formed by affixes . Agglutinative languages.

Semitic languages - the stems of words themselves have the necessary forms formed by inflection of the stems, although the relationship between stem and affix in Semitic languages is the same as in agglutinative languages. Inflectional-agglutative.

Indo-European languages - there is an inflection of stems in the formation of the very forms of words that are formed by affixes, as a result of which parts of words in the forms of words here represent in meaning such a connection between themselves in the forms of words that they do not have in the two above-mentioned types. Inflected languages.

Chinese, Siamese, etc. - there are no forms of individual words. In the morphological classification, these languages are called root languages. The root is not part of the word, but the word itself.

Comparison of fusion and agglutination:

· The root can change in phonemic composition / the root does not change in its composition

· Affixes are not unambiguous/unambiguous

· Affixes are non-standard/standard

· Affixes are attached to a stem, which is usually not used without these affixes / affixes are attached to something that, in addition to this affix, constitutes a separate independent word

· The connection of affixes with roots and stems has the character of a close plexus or fusion/mechanical attachment

55. Morphological classification of languages: synthetism and analyticism.

August-Wilhelm Schlegel showed two possibilities of grammatical structure in inflectional languages: synthetic and analytical.

Synthetic methods are methods that express grammar within a word (internal inflection, affixation, repetitions, additions, stress, supletivism).

Analytical methods are methods that express grammar outside the word (function words, word order, intonation).

With the synthetic tendency of grammar, the grammatical meaning is synthesized and combined with lexical meanings within the word, which, given the unity of the word, is a strong indicator of the whole. With the analytical tendency, grammatical meanings are separated from the expression of lexical meanings.

The word of synthetic languages is independent, full-fledged both lexically and grammatically and requires, first of all, morphological analysis, from which its syntactic properties arise by themselves.

A word in analytical languages expresses one lexical meaning and, being removed from a sentence, is limited only by its nominative capabilities, while it acquires grammatical characteristics only as part of a sentence.

Synthetic languages: Latin, Russian, Sanskrit, Ancient Greek, Gothic, Old Church Slavonic, Lithuanian, German.

Analytical: English, Romance, Danish, Modern Greek, Modern Persian, Modern Indian, Bulgarian.

56. Typology: universals.

Universality in linguistics is one of the most important concepts of typology, a property inherent in all or the vast majority of natural languages. The development of the theory of universals is often associated with the name of Joseph Greenberg, although similar ideas were put forward in linguistics long before him.

The classification of universals is made on several grounds.

· Absolute universals (characteristic of all known languages, for example: every natural language has vowels and consonants) and statistical universals (tendencies) are contrasted. An example of a statistical universal: almost all languages have nasal consonants (however, in some West African languages, nasal consonants are not separate phonemes, but allophones of oral stops in the context of nasal consonants). Adjacent to statistical universals are the so-called frequentals - phenomena that occur in the languages of the world quite often (with a probability exceeding random).

· Implicative (complex) universals are also contrasted with absolute universals, that is, those that affirm the connection between two classes of phenomena. For example, if a language has a dual number, it also has a plural number. A special case of implicate universals are hierarchies, which can be represented as a set of “two-term” implicate universals. This is, for example, the Keenan-Comrie hierarchy (a hierarchy of availability of noun phrases, regulating, among other things, the availability of arguments for relativization:

Subject > Direct object > Indirect object > Indirect object > Possessed > Object of comparison

According to Keenan and Comrie, the set of elements available for relativization in some way covers a continuous segment of this hierarchy.

Other examples of hierarchy are Silverstein's hierarchy (hierarchy of animacy), a hierarchy of types of arguments available for reflexivization

Implicative universals can be either one-sided (X > Y) or two-sided (X<=>Y). For example, SOV word order is usually associated with the presence of postpositions in a language, and conversely, most postpositional languages have SOV word order.

· Deductive (obligatory for all languages) and inductive (common for all known languages) universals are also contrasted.

Universals are distinguished at all levels of language. Thus, in phonology a certain number of absolute universals are known (often relating to a set of segments); a number of universal properties are also distinguished in morphology. The study of universals is most widespread in syntax and semantics.

The study of syntactic universals is primarily associated with the name of Joseph Greenberg, who identified a number of essential properties associated with word order. In addition, the existence of universals within the framework of many linguistic theories is considered as confirmation of the existence of a universal grammar; the theory of principles and parameters has been studying universals.

Within the framework of semantic research, the theory of universals has led, in particular, to the creation of various directions based on the concept of a universal semantic metalanguage, primarily within the framework of the work of Anna Wierzbicka.

Linguistics also studies universals within the framework of diachronic studies. For example, it is known that the historical transition → is possible, but the reverse one is not. Many universal properties associated with the historical development of the semantics of morphological categories (in particular, within the framework of the method of semantic maps) have been identified.

Within the framework of generative grammar, the existence of universals is often considered as evidence of the existence of a special universal grammar, but functional directions connect them rather with the general features of the human cognitive apparatus. For example, the well-known work of J. Hawkins shows the connection between the so-called “branching parameter” and the characteristics of human perception.