LCS - LESSON 6

• a branch of linguistics called Diachronic or historical linguistics, which looks at the historical development of a language by giving attention to the changes that occurred in it over a period of time, will be the main focus as well as the identification of the classification of these languages.
• ❖       One of the activities in historical linguistics has been to classify languages according to genetic relationships.
• ❖       Language family includes all related languages under having descended from a single ancestral language referred to as protolanguage (proto– means ‘early’ in Greek).  
• ❖       Language family includes all related languages under having descended from a single ancestral language referred to as protolanguage (proto– means ‘early’ in Greek).  
• ❖       The ancestral language is usually not known directly, but it is possible to discover many of its features by applying the comparative method and a convincing number of cognates.
• Linguists manage to set up genetic classifications by comparing languages and defining constant rules about their similarities (and differences). This method is called comparative linguistics
• ❖       Cognates are words that are related to another by descent from the same ancestral language.
• ❖       For Example, Latin ‘t’ corresponds to the sound written in English as ‘th’ such as tenius and thin, tres and three, trans and through.
• ❖       According to Ethnologue (16th edition), nearly 7,000 languages are spoken today, and there are 147 language families in the world.
• ❖       Branches - the subdivisions of a language family.
• ❖       Proto-Indo-European language, the mother language, or PIE family, consists of some branches like Germanic, Celtic, Romance or Italic, and Balto-Slavic.
• ❖       For instance, if we compare, for instance, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Romanian, we discover a surprising set of resemblances, which give to these languages a "family likeness".  This "family likeness" does not appear when comparing French to German. But if one compares German to English, Dutch, Swedish or Danish, one finds another "family likeness" between these languages.
• ❖       We know the common origin (Latin) of the five languages we mentioned first, called romance languages, whereas we don't have any written documents in the former language of the four languages we referred to after, called Germanic languages.
• ❖       Language is an essential part of human culture; it allows us to communicate with others and share our experiences and ideas.
• ❖       The term “language” is used here to refer to both the system of communication itself and also to the speech community that uses it.
• ❖       A language can be defined as a system of symbols (words, sounds, gestures) that people use to convey meaning and express themselves.
• ❖       Language is an essential part of human culture; it allows us to communicate with others and share our experiences and ideas.
• ❖       A language can be defined as a system of symbols that people use to communicate with each other through spoken words, gestures, signs, etc.
• ❖       The development of language has been influenced by various factors such as geography, history, religion, politics, economics, technology, social norms, and cultural values.
• Morphological Typology – classification of languages according to common morphological structures.
• the family tree of the English language.

  
• ❖       English uses various morphological strategies to express grammatical tense, aspect, plurality, possession, comparative and superlative degrees and other relationships.
• ❖       To express relationship, English uses inflectional affixation (cats, freezing, biggest) as well as vowel mutation (foot/feet, run/ran), and suppletion (go/went, good/better) to show inflections on verbs, nouns and adjectives.
• ❖       Rather, English relies on Word Order to express case relationships (e.g., subject, direct object and indirect object) and grammatical functions.
• ❖       English thus has what we call a mixed system: some grammatical relationships are expressed morphologically and some by word order.
• Synthetic languages – languages that express grammatical relationships morphologically.
• ❖       English is more of an analytic language. Here, words tend to consist of free morphemes with very few affixes.
• ❖       Synthetic languages form words by affixing morphemes to a root morpheme. These are typically further broken down into two subtypes: Agglutinative and Fusional.
• ❖       Agglutinative language – can have several morphemes that attach to a root morpheme, and each morpheme has only one distinct meaning.
• ❖       Polysynthetic language – these are highly agglutinative languages, languages with a high number of morphemes per word.
• ❖       Fusional language – language in which morphemes have more than one meaning fused into a single suffix.
• ❖       Fusional languages, like other synthetic languages, may have more than one morpheme per word.
• ❖       In analytic language, grammatical information is conveyed by word order and particles rather than by inflectional morphemes.
• Isolating languages are “purely analytic” and allow no affixation (inflectional or derivational) at all.
• ❖       Sometimes analytic languages allow some derivational morphology such as compounds (two free roots in a single word)
• A canonically analytic language is Mandarin Chinese