Iranian languages; and so on. Members of a language family have a

historical connection with one another and descend from a single

ancestor. Language family trees show the relationships among

languages; the oldest traceable ancestor language is usually shown at the

top of the tree, and the bottom branches show the distance of

relationship among current living members of the family. Related

languages are alike in that their grammatical elements and vocabulary

show regular correspondences in both sound and meaning. For example,

the English word fish corresponds to Latin piscis, and English father to

Latin pater. The English and Latin words are cognates, that is,

genetically the same. Where English has f, Latin has p; English th

corresponds to Latin t; and so forth. Comparative linguistics is the field

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in which sound and meaning core spondences (that is, cognates) among

languages are analyzed; genetic groups of languages are established;

and by comparing modern languages, the hypothetical ancestor

languages of such groups are tentatively reconstructed. (Such

reconstructed precursor languages are indicated by the term proto-, as in

Proto-Indo-European.)

The best-known language family is the Indo-European family,

which represents about 1.6 billion people and includes most of the

languages of Europe and northern India and several languages of the

region in between. Indo-European has the following subfamilies: Italic,

Germanic, Celtic, Greek, Baltic, Slavic, Armenian, Albanian, Indo-

Iranian, and the extinct Hittite and Tocharian. Further subclassifications

exist within subfamilies. English, for example, belongs to the Anglo-

Frisian group of the West Germanic branch of the Germanic subfamily.

The closest relative of English is Frisian, which is spoken today only in

parts of Germany and the Netherlands. The relationship of English to

other Indo-European languages, such as Swedish (North Germanic),

Latin (Italic), and Sanskrit (Indo-Iranian) is progressively more distant.

The Indo-European family is only one of several dozen families and

proposed larger groupings. The Uralic family includes various

languages of the Ural Mountains region and Siberia and also such

Europian languages as Finnish, Estonian and Hungarian (the western

members of the Finno-Ugric branch), the Altaic family, the main

branches of which are Turkic, Mongolian, and Manchu-Tungus. Among

other language families are such as Caucasian family, Malayo-

Polynesian family, Afro-Asiatic family, Eskimo-Aleut family, etc.

Languages may resemble each other in one way or another for

reasons other than a genetic relationship. The main non-genetic source

of similarity is language contact; when the speech communities for two

language are in close cultural contact, their languages often influence

one another. So modern Japanese vocabulary includes thousands of

words borrowed from Chinese and uses the Chinese writing system (as

well as writing systems specific to Japanese). But, except in the sense

that all human languages may be ultimately related to one another, there

is no evidence that Japanese is genetically related to Chinese. A more

complicated situation occurred in Western Asia with the complicated

cultural influences among people speaking Arabic, Persian, and Turkish.

These three languages belong to separate language families (Afro-

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Asiatic, Indo-European, and Altaic, respectively), which are either

unrelated to one another or only very distantly related, but Turkish and

Persian have borrowed many words from Arabic, Turkish has also

borrowed many words from Persian, and Persian borrowed its writing

system from Arabic.

1.2.2. Typological classifications of languages

In contrast with genealogical classifications, typological

classifications do not address relationships among languages; they are

based on the resemblances between the languages to be classified

without regard to their origins. Such classifications give rise to what are

called typological classes. Typological classifications may be

established on the basis of different language levels: morphological,

syntactic, phonological.

Morphological classifications emerged in the 19th century, when

linguists attempted to group the world’s languages according to their

common morphological structures. First developed by brothers F.

Schlegel and A. Schlegel, morphological typology organizes languages

on the basis of how those languages form words by combining

morphemes. Two primary categories exist to distinguish all languages:

analytic (isolating) languages and synthetic languages where each term

refers to the opposite end of a continuous scale including all the world’s

languages.

Grammatical expression of meaning may happen in a number of

different ways, as exemplified by the various methods of expressing the

distinction between singular and plural in the nouns of different

languages:

1. No expression: Japanese hito ‘person’, pl. hito

2. Function word: Tagalog bato ‘stone’, pl. mga bato

3. Affixation: Turkish ev ‘house’, pl. ev-ler; Swahili m-toto

‘child’, pl. wa-toto

4. Sound change: English man, pl. men; Arabic rajulun ‘man’,

pl. rija1lun

5. Reduplication: Malay anak ‘child’, pl. anak-anak

The most important typological distinction is between the types 1-2,

where each word consists of only one morpheme, and types 3-5, where a

word often consists of more than one morpheme.

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Languages in which a word tends to consist of only one morpheme

are called analytic (or isolating). These languages have no inflection,

and the most extreme ones make limited use of processes of word

formation. Analytic languages typically have words of one syllable with

no affixes, or added parts; words in sentences are on their own, isolated,

English is a mildly synthetic language, while older Indo-European

languages, like Latin, Greek and Sanskrit, are highly synthetic. All of

them have plenty of inflection, derivation and compounding. The entire