linguistic tree. Genealogical classification of languages: basic principles and features

GENEALOGICAL CLASSIFICATION OF LANGUAGES

Genealogical classification of languages ​​- the study and grouping of the languages ​​of the world based on the determination of family ties between them (assigning them to the same family, group), i.e., on the basis of a common origin from the alleged proto-language. Each family comes from divergent dialects of one language (the parent language of this family), for example, all Romance languages ​​\u200b\u200bcome from dialects of folk (vulgar) Latin, which were spoken by most of population of the Roman Empire before its collapse.

The genealogical (genetic) classification of languages ​​is based on the relationship of kinship between the languages ​​of the commonality of some languages ​​by origin. When classifying languages ​​according to the common origin, "the establishment of a connection between the studied phenomena in time, the study of transitions from lower forms to higher ones" takes place.

The French scientist A. Meillet wrote: "Two languages ​​are called related when they are both the results of two different evolutions of the same language that was in use before."

To determine the place of a language, according to the genealogical classification of languages, it must be compared with other related languages ​​of the same family and with their common parent language. In languages ​​that use morphonological alternations, which are associated with a change in the place of word stress in a word form, whole groups of word forms related to each other within one can be identified with each other by origin.

In such areas of vocabulary as numerals, it is possible to borrow entire lexical groups from one language to another, which, even if there is a system of dictionary correspondences that obey certain rules, does not make it possible to directly conclude that languages ​​belong to one family. The coincidence of modern Japanese forms of numerals from "one" to "six" with modern Tibetan ones is explained only by the fact that the Japanese language more than 1000 years ago, in the era of strong Chinese influence on Japanese culture, borrowed these from Chinese, ultimately related to Tibetan.

This means that the proximity of the two contacting languages ​​made possible the coexistence of two parallel forms of the same word (for example, Old English eu "egg" and Old Scandinavian egg > modern English egg "egg"; Russian " hope" and church Slav. "hope"), after which one of the words won.

Most related languages ​​(dialects), after separation from each other, may find themselves secondarily in linguistic contact, in which a significant number of words (including the most commonly used) are borrowed from one language (dialect) into another. In the traditional genealogical classification of languages, only the initial common origin of languages ​​from dialects of one language is usually recorded.

If related languages ​​or dialects do not completely stop contacts with each other, then secondary interlingual (interdialect) connections may overlap earlier ones, which makes it difficult to consistently carry out a genealogical classification of languages ​​according to the genealogical tree principle. Each common language (parent language) breaks down into two or more parent languages, which, in turn, can break up into two or more intermediate parent languages, from which really known languages ​​could develop. For example, all known Slavic languages ​​were derived from Common Slavic through three intermediate proto-languages ​​(West Slavic, South Slavic and East Slavic), and the presence of intermediate proto-languages ​​can also be assumed. Denoting the ancient dialects of the Proto-Slavic language in accordance with the languages ​​into which these dialects later turned, we can distinguish at least 7 such dialects that were in contact with each other in the 1st millennium BC.

Prolekhite

Proto-North East Slavic

Prolusatian

Proto-Czech-Slovak-Slovenian

Proto-South East Slavic

Proto-Central South Slavic

Proto-Peripheral South Slavic

The closer the separation of related languages ​​to historical time and the greater the number of monuments reflecting the ancient dialect fragmentation of these languages, the more realistic the picture of their historical relationships, fixed in the genealogical classification of languages, can be. In the absence of ancient texts and at a great remoteness of the time of separation of related languages, the schemes of their relationships, fixed in the genealogical classification of languages, remain more conditional (for example, in relation to many languages ​​of Southeast Asia or South America).

The genealogical classification of languages ​​fixes only the origin of some main part of grammatical and lexical (root) morphs, without assuming that the source of all other morphs is known. For example, in such well-known Indo-European languages ​​as Germanic and Greek, the origin of a significant number of substrate words, ultimately presumably related to North Caucasian ones, is only now beginning to be clarified. For all these reasons, the genealogical classification of languages ​​can still be considered to be only at a preliminary stage of its development.

Separate observations that precede the genealogical classification of languages ​​are already contained in the works of medieval scholars: Mahmud Kashgari on the Turkic languages, Arabic and Jewish linguists who compared Semitic languages ​​with each other, etc. A successful experience in the synthesis of previous opinions on the genealogical classification of languages ​​can be found in G. Leibniz. The foundations of the genealogical classification of languages ​​were outlined in comparative historical linguistics as early as the 19th century, but its further improvement in the spirit of Schmidt's theory of waves was carried out in the light of the achievements of linguistic geography in the 20th century. The most intensive work on refining the genealogical classification of most languages ​​in Southeast Asia, Africa, North and South America was carried out in the middle and second half of the 20th century. The beginning of systematic work on the unification of languages ​​into "macrofamilies" dates back to the same time.

In order to concretely imagine how the concept of language kinship was formed, let us schematically depict the path along which linguistics moved from collecting various linguistic facts to constructing a theory explaining them. Researchers have long noticed that there are common features in the structures of many Euro-Asian languages, for example, Polish woda, Russian water, English water, German Wasser, but Japanese mizu, Chinese shui, or Old Russian oko, Polish oko, German Auge, Lithuanian akis, but Japanese me, Chinese yangjing. Thousands of such facts form the overall picture. At the same time, it turned out that it is important to compare precisely ancient words and morphemes. A comparison of the original (original) words, roots, service affixes will be reliable.

The question of the ancestral home of the Indo-Europeans

According to scientists, a single Proto-Indo-European linguistic community could exist in the 6th-5th millennium BC. e. There is no consensus regarding the place of the initial settlement of the Indo-Europeans. There are three points of view on this issue.

1. The original habitat of the Indo-Europeans is Asia Minor and neighboring territories. From here, as a result of migrations, Indo-European tribes settled in various regions of Asia and Europe. Only the peoples of the Anatolian group (Hittites, Luvians, etc.) remained in their former place. This hypothesis is being developed by Soviet linguists T.V. Gamkrelidze and V.V. Ivanov.

2. Indo-Europeans inhabited a large steppe territory of the Trans-Volga region and Northern Kazakhstan and invaded Europe in the 5th-4th millennium BC. e., where they met with local non-Indo-European peoples. This hypothesis was put forward by the American archaeologist M. Gimbutas and received in Lately known distribution.

3. However, in our opinion, the most likely assumption is that the early Indo-Europeans settled in areas of central and partly eastern Europe (especially in the Danube basin). This hypothesis, based on a long philological tradition, has solid archaeological and linguistic support and can be considered as the main one.

4.02. Classification indo European languages

The historical development of the Indo-European languages ​​led to the formation of separate language groups. let's look at them in more detail.

1. Indian group. Includes at least 20 languages ​​and consists of three subgroups: a. North Indian, which includes all the modern Indian languages ​​of India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Nepal: Hindustani, Bihari, Rajasthani, Punjabi, Bengali, Marathi, Gujarati, Oriya, Assamese, Nepali, etc., as well as the Parya language, discovered in the 1950s gg. in Tajikistan by the Soviet researcher I.M. Orange; b. Ceylon, represented by the Sinhala language (Sri Lanka), which broke away from the northern Indian languages ​​about 2500 years ago; V. gypsy, which includes numerous dialects of the gypsy language of Europe and Asia (Northern Russian, Kalderar, Ursar, Bosha, Navar, etc.), the exodus of the ancestors of the gypsies from India dates back to the 1st millennium AD. e. Of the dead Indian languages, Sanskrit should be mentioned, the first monuments of which date back to the 4th century BC. BC e.

2. Iranian group. It includes about 40 languages, united in four subgroups: a. northwestern, including Median, Parthian (dead), Kurdish, Talysh, Gilan, Mazandaran and Balochi languages; b. northeastern, consisting of the Scythian, Khorezmian and Sogdian (dead), Ossetian and Yagnob languages; V. southwestern, which includes dead ancient Persian and modern Persian, Tajik, Dari, Tat and other languages; southeastern, including Bactrian (dead), Afghan, Munjan, and also Pamir languages.

3. Dard group. Its existence is not recognized by all scientists, however, recent studies show the need to separate the Dardic languages ​​into a single classification unit. These languages, spoken by the populations of the northern highlands of Afghanistan, Pakistan and India, fall into three sub-groups: a. western (or kafir): kati, vaigali, ashkun, prasun, dameli; b. central: pashai, shumashti, glangali, kalasha, khavar, etc.; V. Eastern: Torvali, Sheena, Phalura, Kashmiri, etc.

4. Baltic group. Includes two modern (Lithuanian and Latvian) and one dead (Prussian) language, which shows closeness to the Slavic languages. Writing in Lithuanian since the 16th century.

5. Slavic group. It includes 13 major modern languages ​​and a number of minor languages ​​and dialects. Slavic languages ​​are divided into three subgroups: a. South Slavic, including Old Church Slavonic (dead), Bulgarian, Serbian, Macedonian and Slovenian; b. West Slavic: Polish, Kashubian, Czech, Slovak, Upper Lusatian, Lower Lusatian; V. East Slavic: Russian, Ukrainian, Belarusian languages. Writing in the Old Slavonic language from the middle of the 11th century. The Slavic group in our manual is devoted to sections 3.01-3.04.

6. Celtic group. Includes four modern languages: Breton, Welsh, Irish and Manx. In the past, the languages ​​of this group were much more widespread, up to the territory of Belarus and Ukraine, and included, for example, the languages ​​of the original population of France (Gaulish), England and other territories.

7. Romanesque group. It is divided into four subgroups: a. Balkan-Romance, which includes Romanian, Moldavian and the extinct Dalmatian languages; b. Italo-Romance, consisting of Italian, Sardinian and Romansh; V. Gallo-Romance, including French, Provencal and Catalan; Ibero-Romance: Spanish and Portuguese. The oldest written monuments in these languages ​​date back to the 8th-9th centuries. However, even before that time, Latin was widely spoken in Europe, the official language of the Roman Empire, which in its colloquial form was the source of the formation of all modern Romance languages ​​and dialects. Latin is part of the Italic group, which is actually the predecessor of the modern Romance group. In the past, it included, in addition to Latin, also the Oscan, Umbrian and Faliscan languages. All of them are currently dead.

Some scholars also include the Esperanto language, invented in the 1980s by the Warsaw doctor L.L. Zamenhof. Esperanto shows great closeness to the Romance languages ​​in terms of vocabulary and morphology. Ido (a reformed version of Esperanto) is also included in the Romance group.

8. German group. Consists of three subgroups: a. East Germanic: dead Gothic; b. West Germanic: English, German, Dutch, Afrikaans, Frisian and Yiddish (modern Hebrew) languages; V. North Germanic (Scandinavian): Icelandic, Norwegian, Faroese, Swedish, Danish. The oldest written monuments in the Gothic language (4th century AD).

9. Albanian group. It currently includes one language, Albanian, whose position in the circle of Indo-European languages ​​is still unclear.

10. Greek group. Presented in two languages: dead ancient Greek and modern Greek.

11. Armenian group. Consists of two languages: dead ancient Armenian and modern Armenian.

12. Anatolian group. It has now completely disappeared. The Anatolian languages ​​can be divided into two subgroups: a. Hittite-Lydian, including the Hittite, Lydian, Carian languages; b. Luwian-Lycian, formed by the Luwian, Palaian, Lycian, Sidetic, Pisidian, Isaurian, Cilician languages. Probably, in the composition of the Anatolian languages, a third subgroup can also be distinguished, formed by one Etruscan language, however, the final relationship between the Etruscan and Anatolian languages ​​has not yet been proven. The first inscriptions in the Hittite language date back to the 17th century. BC e.

13. Tocharian group. It consists of two extinct languages, the so-called Tocharian A and Tocharian B, which were spoken by the population of northwestern China at the end of the first millennium AD. e.

14. Indo-European language family also includes some of the now extinct languages ​​of Europe and Asia Minor, which do not show closeness to the named groups of Indo-European languages ​​and are known only from fragmentary inscriptions. These are the following languages: Thracian, Daco-Mysian, Phrygian, Illyrian, Messapian, Venetian, and also the reconstructed Pelasgian language. The discovery of the language of the Pelasgians should be said in more detail. It was discovered by analyzing "non-Greek" appearance and the structure of words in the ancient Greek language, which, as scientists believed, were borrowed from the vanished already in the 1st millennium BC. e. the language of the indigenous population of Greece, as well as as a result of the study of geographical names (toponyms), which often remain for a long time almost unchanged. The Bulgarian linguist V. Georgiev defined the essence of this method as follows: "A new application of the comparative historical method is as follows: by establishing a consistent system of characteristic features (sound correspondences) of the comparative historical phonetics of the disappeared unknown language, determine its vocabulary and thus reconstruct in general terms itself language" .

This is the range of currently known Indo-European languages. Less traditional is the inclusion in this family of a number of so-called pidgins and creole languages ​​formed on the basis of any language (for example, English or French) and using its vocabulary, but using it in accordance with the grammatical rules of the language of the indigenous population of this territory. An example of such a language is Pidgin English (or Tok Pisin), which is today the official language of Papua New Guinea.

Genealogical classification – it is a classification of languages ​​according to the principle of kinship, i.e. on the basis of their family ties and the common origin of their supposed proto-language. Languages ​​united by a common origin form a family of related languages. In accordance with this classification, Indo-European, Afroasian, Dravidian, Ural, Altai, etc.

The parent language is the language - the basis of the historical community of related languages. There are several groups of languages ​​that are more closely related to each other than to other languages ​​of the same family. Such groups are often referred to as "branch languages". They are subdivided into smaller groups, where the connection between languages ​​is even closer.

The parent language is usually restored by reconstruction, carried out using the comparative historical method. Most reliable in reconstruction
- morphological indicators- the ease of their comparison is determined, firstly, by semantic reasons (the limited set of possible grammatical meanings in all languages ​​of the world and their exceptional stability with the clarity of probable semantic changes that obey strict rules: a morph denoting mood or aspect can acquire the meaning of time, etc.). P.

- phonetic indicators
- of all the phonemes of each language, a relatively small part is used in the endings. This facilitates the establishment of correspondences between languages, especially in cases where the coinciding forms are formed from the same roots and the correspondence extends to the entire word forms.

The lexical indicator is the least reliable (since vocabulary is a very variable substance)

The construction of the genealogical classification took place at different stages. According to Schleicher, each common language (proto-language) broke up into two languages, which also broke up into two, from which the known languages ​​developed.

According to Schmidt's theory, related languages ​​gradually pass into each other through a series of intermediate dialects. With the disappearance of intermediate dialects, the differences between related languages ​​become more tangible.

Main families of languages:

1. Indo-European family, one of the largest families of Eurasian languages. It includes more than ten branches of languages, among which are both living and dead languages:

- Hittite-Luvian or Anatolian group (Hittite, Luwian, etc.) all languages ​​are dead

- Indian or Indo-Aryan group(northern half of the Indian subcontinent). Languages: Sanskrit, Hindi, Bengali, Sindhi, Romani,

- Iranian group, uniting the languages ​​of three chronological periods: ancient (Avestan), middle (Pahlavi, Farsi), new (Tajik, Ossetian)

- Tocharian group, which unites the Eastern Tocharian and Western Tocharian languages, which were common in the north of Eastern Turkmenistan, both languages ​​​​of nomadic tribes are now dead

- Illyrian group ( northwestern part of the Balkans, eastern Italy), including Illyrian and Messapian dead languages

-greek group, which unites the languages ​​of three chronological periods: ancient (ancient Greek), middle (middle Greek, Byzantine), new (modern Greek)

- Italian group. Italics came from the north to peninsula in the 2nd millennium BC (Latin, Faliscan, vernacular Latin, Italian, French, Romanian)

- Celtic group ( the extreme west of Europe). There are three subgroups: Gallic, British (Welsh, Breton), Goydel (Irish, Scottish). About 6 million speakers

- german group, in which three subgroups are distinguished: East Germanic (Gothic, Burgundian), West Germanic (German, English, Dutch), North Germanic (Icelandic, Swedish, Norwegian)

- Baltic group, in which two subgroups are distinguished: West Baltic (Prussian, Golyadsky), East Baltic (Lithuanian, Latvian)

- Slavic group , in which he distinguishes three subgroups: South Slavic (Bulgarian, Serbian, Croatian), West Slavic (Czech, Slovak, Polish), East Slavic (Russian, Ukrainian). About 250 million people speak Slavic languages.

1. Ural family, including two groups: - Finno-Ugric (Finnish, Karelian, Estonian), Volga (Mari. Mordovian), Permian (Udmurt), - Samoyedic (Nenets, Enets).
2. Afroasian, This is a large language group, which includes 240 languages ​​spoken by 250 million native speakers. It includes: ancient Egyptian, Hebrew and Aramaic, as well as the well-known Nigerian language Hausa. Some dialects of Arabic are spoken by approx. 200 million people!
3. caucasian languages, In total there are 38 Caucasian languages, they are spoken by about 5 million people. The most famous: Abkhazian and Chechen.
4. Dravidian family, the ancient languages India, just ok. 25, the number of speakers 150 million people. The most famous of the languages ​​of this family are Tamil and Telugu.
5. Yukagiro-Chuvan family, they are a family of related languages ​​spoken by the Yukagirs, a Siberian people who seem to reside in the Kolyma River basin.

7. Altai family. The Altaic family includes about 60 languages ​​spoken by about 250 million people. Turkish and Mongolian languages ​​belong to this family.

8. Chukchi-Kamchatka family. Possibly the smallest family with only 5 languages ​​spoken by 23,000 speakers. The distribution area of ​​these languages ​​is the northeastern part of Siberia. Many linguists believe that these are two different families.

9. Yenisei family. Genetically isolated languages ​​of Siberia and Far East

10. Chinese- Tibetan family. A very significant language family, which includes about 250 languages. Standard Chinese (Putonghua) alone is spoken by 1 billion people!

11. Austroasiatic family. Austro-Asiatic (Munda languages ​​in India and Mon-Khmer languages ​​in South-East Asia) includes 150 languages ​​spoken by 60 million people, including Vietnamese.

12. Austronesian family. This family includes 1000 different languages ​​spoken by 250 million people. Malay and Indonesian (essentially the same language) are spoken by approx. 140 million. Other languages ​​of this family include: Madagascar in Africa, Tagalog in the Philippines, Aboriginal languages ​​of Formosa (Taiwan)

13. papuan family, uniting about a thousand numerous heterogeneous languages ​​of New Guinea and the Pacific Islands.

GENEALOGICAL CLASSIFICATION OF THE LANGUAGES OF THE WORLD

INTRODUCTION

The genealogical classification of languages ​​is closely related to the concept of linguistic kinship. The kinship of languages ​​is manifested in their systematic material similarity, i.e., in the similarity of the material from which the exponents of morphemes and words that are identical or close in meaning are built in these languages.

It is necessary to distinguish between two types of historical connection of languages: on the one hand - contact , caused by geographical, territorial neighborhood, contact of civilizations, bilateral or unilateral cultural influences, etc.; on the other side - ancestral relationship languages ​​that have developed in a process of divergence from one more or less unified language that existed before. Language contacts lead to the borrowing of words, individual expressions, as well as root and some affixal (usually derivational) morphemes. However, some categories of linguistic elements, as a rule, are not borrowed. First of all, these are affixes of form formation - indicators of the corresponding grammatical categories, usually also function words. There are also categories of significant words for which borrowing is less typical, for example: terms of closest relationship, names of body parts, numerals - designations of a relatively small number (especially in the range from 1 to 10), verbs - names of the most elementary actions, substitute words for various kind and some others. If in any languages ​​there is a more or less systematic material similarity in the field of form-building affixes and in the categories of words listed now, such similarity indicates not about influences and borrowings, but about the original relationship of these languages, that these languages ​​are different historical continuations. the same language that existed before.

The French linguist Antoine Meillet formulated the definition of linguistic kinship as follows: "Two languages ​​are called related when they are both the result of two different evolutions of the same language that was in use before."

This language is the common “ancestor” of related languages, i.e., the language that gradually turned into each of the related languages ​​in the course of “two different evolutions” or disintegrated into related languages ​​is called their parent language , or base language, and the whole set of related languages ​​is called a language family.

Thus, Russian, Lithuanian, Latin, French, Spanish, Greek, Old Indian, English, German, the extinct Hittite and a number of other living and dead languages ​​together make up Indo-European family languages. It arose as a result of the collapse of the common Indo-European language-base (Proto-Indo-European) and the long-term independent development of its isolated territorial branches - dialects, which gradually turned into separate, albeit related, languages.

The Indo-European language-base is not recorded by written monuments: it ceased to exist as a relatively unified (although, apparently, having dialects) language long before the first written monuments, in any case, no later than the end of the 3rd millennium BC. e.; the words and forms of this language are only supposedly reconstructed by scientists on the basis of a comparison of the facts of related languages ​​that have arisen from it.

Usually, a language family is a kind of set of languages, within which there are groups united by closer kinship, the so-called branches. So, in the Indo-European family, Slavic, Germanic, Romance, Indian and other branches stand out. The languages ​​of each branch go back to their base language - Proto-Slavic, Proto-Germanic (otherwise - Common Slavic, Common Germanic), etc., which in turn is an offshoot from the parent language of the whole family, in this case Common Indo-European. Proto-Slavic, Proto-Germanic, etc., existed as relatively unified languages ​​in an era later than the common Indo-European, but also preceding written monuments (Proto-Slavic, for example, probably before the 6th-7th centuries AD).

Within the branches, subsets are distinguished, united by an even closer relationship. An example of such a subset is the East Slavic group, covering Russian, Ukrainian, and Belarusian. The basis language of these three languages ​​was the Old Russian (Old East Slavonic) language, which existed as a more or less unified (albeit subdivided into tribal dialects) language in the era of Kievan Rus.

The ratio of branches and groups within one language family is schematically depicted in the form of a "family tree". However, the actual relationship between related languages ​​is much more complicated: the disintegration of the base language does not occur in one step (some branches separate earlier, others later), separate innovations, arising in different places and in different time, unevenly cover branches and groups. As a result, for example, the Slavic branch is more closely connected with the Baltic (i.e., Lithuanian, Latvian and Old Prussian languages) in some features, with the Iranian branch in other features, with the Germanic branch in some features, etc.

The situation is similar in other language families.

1. LANGUAGE

A comparative historical study of the Indo-European languages ​​has revealed regular correspondences between their sounds, words and forms. This can be explained by the fact that they are all descendants of one extinct ancient language from which they originated. Such a source language is usually called a proto-language (compare: great-grandfather, great-parent).

The realism of the theory of the parent language was confirmed in the last century by a comparative historical study of the group of Romance languages ​​(Italian, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Romanian): the original words and forms restored for them (protoforms, or archetypes) coincided with the written evidence of the so-called folk ( or vulgar) Latin - the everyday colloquial language of the ancient Romans, from which these languages ​​\u200b\u200boriginated.

In the middle of the XIX century. on the basis of the theory of the proto-language, a “family tree” scheme took shape, in accordance with which it was believed that all the languages ​​​​of the Indo-European family occurred as a result of the sequential binomial disintegration of the Indo-European proto-language; the creator of this scheme, the German scientist A. Schleicher, even wrote a fable in the Indo-European proto-language, which he considered an undoubted historical reality. However, many linguists had doubts: the restored facts of the parent language could actually refer to its different historical states, and not coexist. Changes reflected modern languages of the same family, could belong to different ancient eras.

By the beginning of the XX century. the theory of the proto-language was called into question, and the "kinship" of languages ​​​​was reduced to a system of linguistic correspondences. The consequence of this skepticism was the subsequent rethinking of the concept of the parent language: a number of relations established with the help of the comparative historical method have scientific reality, and in all its specificity, the parent language cannot be restored.

For example, using the comparative historical method, the following series of correspondences is established between the descendants of the Proto-Indo-European language: Sanskrit And , Avestan And , Old Slavonic b , Lithuanian And , Armenian And , ancient Greek v , Latin And , Irish And , gothic And . All of them go back to one sound of the Proto-Indo-European language. Is "and" only a conditional indication of the given series of correspondences? Or do the correspondences give us the right to conclude what this sound was in the Proto-Indo-European language? For example, that it was a sound like [and]? There is a dispute about this, on both sides justified by a number of arguments and evidence.

The conclusion should not be the same for the reconstruction of the proto-languages ​​of different "levels": the reconstruction of the proto-language of a separate branch of languages ​​\u200b\u200b- the Proto-Romansh mentioned above, i.e. Vulgar Latin, or Proto-Slavic - the ancestor of modern Slavic languages that existed at the beginning of a new era. Less reliable is the restoration of earlier proto-linguistic states, in particular Proto-Indo-European, to which Proto-Slavic, Proto-Germanic and other proto-languages ​​of certain groups of modern Indo-European languages ​​historically go back.

The theory of the proto-language developed in Indo-European linguistics in the 19th century. In the XX century. it began to be used in the comparative historical study of other language families (Turkic, Finno-Ugric, etc.).

2. GENEALOGICAL CLASSIFICATION OF LANGUAGES

Here is a list of the main languages, grouped according to the headings of the genealogical classification. The geographical distribution of each family and branch is indicated on special language maps.

I. Indo-European languages.

1. Slavic: Eastern-Russian, Ukrainian, Belarusian; Western - Polish, Czech, Slovak, Upper and Lower Lusatian; southern - Bulgarian, Macedonian, Serbo-Croatian, Slovenian. The dead Old Slavonic (Old Bulgarian) language also belongs to the southern group.

2. Baltic: Lithuanian, Latvian; dead - Old Prussian.

3. Germanic: English, German, Dutch, Afrikaans (in South Africa), Yiddish (New Hebrew); Swedish, Norwegian, Danish, Icelandic, etc. Dead - Gothic.

4. Celtic: Irish, Welsh, Breton etc.

5. Iranian: Spanish, Portuguese, French, Italian, Romanian, Moldavian, etc. The Romance languages ​​arose as a result of the divergent development of folk Latin, which, together with classical Latin and some other dead languages, constituted the Italic branch.

6. Albanian language.

7. Greek languages: Modern Greek and its ancestor Ancient Greek.

8. Iranian languages: Farsi (New Persian), Pashto (Afghan), Tajik, Kurdish, Ossetian, etc. Dead: Avestan, Old Persian, Sogdian, Scythian, etc.

9. Indo-Aryan: Hindi, Urdu, Bengali, Marathi, Punjabi, Nepalese, Gypsy, etc. From the dead - Old Indian (Vedic and Sanskrit) and a number of Middle Indian (Prakrits).

10. Armenian language.

Of the extinct branches of the Indo-European languages, two are better known:

Anatolian (Hittite, Luwian and others in ancient Asia Minor) and Tocharian (in Xinjiang).

II. Afroasian (Semitic-Hamitic) languages.

1. Semitic: Arabic, Amharic (in Ethiopia), Hebrew, etc.;

extinct - Akkadian, Ugaritic, Phoenician, Aramaic, etc.

2. Cushitic, in particular Somali.

3. Berber (in North Africa).

4. Chadic, in particular Hausa (in West Africa, south of the Sahara).

Ancient Egyptian (and Coptic) also belonged to the Afroasian languages ​​as their special branch.

III. Kartvelian languages: Georgian, Megrelian, Chan and Svan.

IV. Abkhaz-Adyghe languages: Abkhaz, Adyghe, Kabardian (Kabardino-Circassian), etc.

V. Nakh-Dagestan languages.

1. Nakh: Chechen, Ingush, Batsbi.

2. Dagestan: Avar, Lak, Dargin, Lezgin and a number of others.

VI. Dravidian languages (South India): Telugu, Tamil, etc.

VII. Uralic languages.

1. Finno-Ugric: Ob-Ugric - Hungarian, Khanty and Mansi; Baltic-Finnish - Finnish (Suomi), Estonian, Karelian and some others; Volga - Mari and two Mordovian (Erzya and Moksha); Perm-Udmurt, Komi-Zyryan and Komi-Permyak; constituting a separate branch - Lappish (Saami).

2. Samoyedic languages: Nenets, etc.

VIII. Turkic: Turkish, Azerbaijani, Turkmen, Uzbek, Kyrgyz, Kazakh, Tatar, Bashkir, Chuvash, Yakut, Tuvan, Karakalpak, Karachay-Balkarian, etc. Dead languages ​​- Orkhon, Old Uigur, as well as the languages ​​of the Khazars, Volga Bulgars, Pechenegs and Polovtsy.

IX. Mongolian: Mongolian, Buryat, Kalmyk, etc.

X. Tungus-Manchurian: Evenki, Even, Nanai, Udege, etc., as well as the obsolete Manchu.

XI. Chukchi-Kamchatka: Chukchi, Itelmen (Kamchadal), Koryak, etc.

XII. Eskimo-Aleutian: Aleut and a number of Eskimo.

XIII. Sino-Tibetan: Chinese, Burmese, Tibetan, etc.

XIV. Thai: Thai, Lao, etc.

XV. Austroasiatic: Vietnamese, Khmer, etc.

XVI. Austronesian languages(Malayo-Polynesian).

1. Indonesian: Malay and Indonesian, Javanese and a number of other languages ​​in Indonesia, Tagalog (in the Philippines), Malagash (on the island of Madagascar), etc.

2. Oceanian: Hawaiian, Taichi, Fiji, etc.

XVII. Kongo-Kordofanian languages.

1. Bantu languages: Swahili, etc.

2. Banthoid: Fulbe, Yoruba, for, etc.

3. Kordofan.

XVIII. Nilo-Saharan languages(possibly several families).

XIX. Koisan languages: Hottentot, Bushman, etc.

Some of the listed families are sometimes reduced to large units, presumably related to more distant kinship, for example, III, IV and V - into the "Caucasian family", VIII, IX and X - into the "Altai family" and even I, II, III, VI , VII, VIII, IX and X - into the "Nostratic macrofamily".

We group the rest of the languages ​​geographically, with each group covering several (perhaps dozens) families.

XX. American Indian (Amerindian) languages.

The most famous are: Quechua (in Peru, Bolivia, Ecuador), Guarani (mainly in Paraguay); Maya (in Central America), Aztec (in Mexico), Navajo, Hopi, etc. (in US Indian reservations and Canada).

XXI. Papuan(on the island New Guinea).

XXII. Australian: arant and many others.

Finally, a number of languages ​​stand alone in the genealogical classification, outside the family. In particular, in Europe such is the position of the Basque, the dead Etruscan; in Asia - Japanese, Korean, some languages ​​​​in Russia (Yukagir, Nivkh, Ket), etc., and from the dead - Sumerian, Elamite and a number of others.

3. THE HOMEHOUSE OF THE INDO-EUROPEANS ACCORDING TO THE LANGUAGE

The ancestral home of the people is the territory where this people was formed as different from the neighboring ones. The idea of ​​the ancestral home is very ancient: it develops in the myths and legends of peoples who are at very early stages of development.

Arguments in favor of one or another solution to the question of the ancestral home of the Indo-Europeans are very diverse and heterogeneous. Most often they are based on the analysis of facts that belong to a later era, when the Indo-European linguistic unity fell apart or decreased. This is, for example, data on specific Indo-European languages ​​that have already emerged from the common Indo-European, their relationship to each other and to the reconstructed language, the location of these isolated languages, their migrations, chronological characteristics, contacts with other languages, etc.

Based on arguments of this type, the time frame of the ancestral home of the Indo-Europeans was attributed to the III millennium BC. e., and after the discovery of the Hittite language - by the 4th or even the 5th millennium BC. e.

Words denoting plants, animals, metals, minerals, landscape elements, forms economic activity And social organization and so on.

If in the definition of spatial boundaries ancient homeland Indo-Europeans, the main role is played by “natural indicators”, then when establishing the time frame for its existence, a similar role belongs to “cultural” indicators, primarily those that are related to the progress of technology and forms of economy. So, for example, chronologically, the ancestral home of the Indo-Europeans (at least before its end) is sometimes attributed to the Neolithic period on the basis of the common European character of two important terms, the etymology of which reveals the technological motives for naming - *aies - "copper", then "bronze" (from the Indo-European ai - "ignite a fire") and *akmen - "anvil" and "stone" (from the Indo-European *ak - "sharp", in connection with the turning technology). Linguistic data relating to terms for plowing, a plow, war chariots, certain types of weapons, utensils, etc., are considered arguments of the same type.

In general, the chronological framework of the ancestral home of the Indo-Europeans is determined much more clearly than the spatial ones. Most experts agree to consider the V-IV millennium BC. e. the time when the most ancient Indo-European civilization existed. With regard to spatial localization, it is currently advisable to reckon with very few options of different significance. One of them considers a wide area as the ancestral home of the Indo-Europeans Central Europe- from the Rhine in the west to Western Ukraine, on which in the V millennium BC. e. a fairly homogeneous Neolithic culture developed. Another version of the reconstructed ancestral home of the Indo-Europeans covers even wider spaces - from the Rhine to Upper Volga(including even Finland) - and relies in its conclusions almost exclusively on archaeological data, referring to the end of the III millennium BC. (Fig. 1.)

More promising are different options for localizing the ancestral home of the Indo-Europeans in the northern Black Sea and Volga regions (“kurgan”, or “ancient pit” culture), where in the V-IV millennia BC. a single culture is being formed (compare, in particular, the domestication of the horse, the use of chariots, mythological representations: the deification of the sun, the thunder god, the cult of the horse, etc.). The realities of the material and cultural life of the “Kurgan” population correspond relatively fully to the fragment of the Indo-European dictionary reconstructed for the Indo-European civilization of this type. It is also significant that later the carriers of this culture rushed from this territory in different directions - to the Balkan-Danubian area (in the 1st half of the 4th millennium BC) and further to Central and Northern Europe, Transcaucasia, Iran and Anatolia (in the 2nd half of the 4th millennium BC); V Eastern Mediterranean and possibly Egypt. This concept developed by M. Gimbutas undoubtedly has a number of advantages over other points of view. One of them is in establishing links between the culture of the southern Russian steppes of the 5th-4th millennium BC. with the cultures of the Balkans, Asia Minor, Transcaucasia.

Rice. 1. Historical and geographical scheme of the ancestral home of Europeans according to the language.

Recently, a new theory of the ancestral home of the Indo-Europeans has been put forward by T. V. Gamkrelidze and V. V. Ivanov. Based primarily on linguistic data, it identifies the ancestral home of the Indo-Europeans with an area within Eastern Anatolia, the South Caucasus and Northern Mesopotamia in the 5th-4th millennia BC. e. Dignity new theory- in the completeness of linguistic argumentation, while a number of linguistic data are involved by scientists for the first time.

The problem of localizing the ancestral home of the Indo-Europeans according to linguistic data, despite the hypothetical nature of all the solutions proposed so far, is also a powerful incentive for further research in the field of Indo-European studies, in which the linguistic and historical principles mutually check and support each other.

4. THE HOMEHOUSE OF THE SLAVES ACCORDING TO THE LANGUAGE

The Old Russian chronicler, noting the unity of the origin of the Slavic peoples, talks about their ancestral home: he tells the legend that in old times a single Slavic people lived along the banks of the Danube, where Hungary and Bulgaria are now, and then different groups of this people settled in new lands, calling themselves differently. So ancient Russian historians of the XI-XII centuries. solved the problem of the ancestral home of the Slavs.

The scientific solution to this problem cannot be based on ancient legends. A people, or an ethnos, is aware of its originality primarily because it notices the originality of its language. But it also differs from other peoples in physical (racial) and cultural and ethnographic features: customs and rituals, features of life, clothing, house-building, etc. And the formation of a people is not only the formation of its language, but also its cultural ethnographic features.

Meanwhile, it has been established that the history of the language and the history of the ethnos do not coincide. The language of modern Hungarians, for example, is closely related to the languages ​​of the Khanty and Mansi living east of the Urals (in the Khanty-Mansi autonomous region V Tyumen region); and this is explained by the fact that the tribes of the Ugrians (the linguistic ancestors of modern Hungarians) came in the 9th century. to the middle Danube from the Urals. But the physical appearance and ethnographic features of the Hungarians are not directly related to the culture of those Ugric tribes that left the banks of the Ob more than a thousand years ago, because these tribes dissolved among the indigenous inhabitants (autochthons) of the Danube, passing on their language and assimilating their culture.

When modern archaeological research reveals that in a particular region of Europe for thousands of years there have been no significant population movements and the cultural and ethnographic features of the modern inhabitants of the region under study are the result of the development of the culture of the autochthonous, this does not mean that the language of the autochthonous was the same as language modern population this area. That is why, with a strictly scientific approach to the problem of the formation of modern peoples, the history of a language is not equivalent to the history of the addition of the physical and cultural-ethnographic features of the speakers of this language. Accordingly, the problem of the ancestral home should be solved separately for the language and for other features of its speakers.

Comparative historical linguistics of the 19th century, having established the fact of the origin of the Slavic languages ​​from a single source - the Proto-Slavic language, put forward the problem of the Slavic ancestral home as a historical and linguistic one. The Proto-Slavic language had to take shape in the zone of contact with the Baltic languages, Iranian, and also Germanic, with which it is united by very ancient common features in vocabulary and grammar.

The geographical conclusions in this case were very general, since the exact location of the Balts and Germans during the formation of the Proto-Slavic language (II-1 millennium BC) was not determined, and only in relation to the ancient Iranians it was known that they lived at that time along north coast Black Sea (they included the Scythians and the Sarmatians who replaced them later). The Slavic ancestral home was determined in this case somewhere to the north or northwest of the northern Black Sea region.

At the turn of the XIX-XX centuries. in developing the problem of the ancestral home of the Slavs, special attention was paid to botanical terminology. It was noted that the names of trees growing in the temperate zone of Central and Eastern Europe are common Slavic (birch, willow, oak, spruce, linden, alder, pine, ash), therefore, they existed in the Proto-Slavic language before its collapse. The names of trees that do not grow east of the Vistula and Dniester basins in Slavic languages ​​are borrowed from Western European languages ​​(beech, yew, etc.). From this it was concluded that in the era of their unity, the Proto-Slavs were not familiar with these trees: the main part of their ancestral home was located east of the border of the distribution of wild-growing beech and covered forest areas abounding in lakes and swamps; the terminology of just such a geographical environment is also common Slavic.

At the same time, words denoting the features of the marine environment were formed independently in different Slavic languages, that is, after separate groups of the disintegrated Proto-Slavic association went to the sea.

At the beginning of the XX century. it was understood that the common Slavic names of objects of the surrounding nature cannot characterize the entire more than a thousand-year period of the development of the Proto-Slavic language, but only reflect the geographical environment in which the Proto-Slavs were on the eve of the collapse. With this in mind, A. A. Shakhmatov (see A. A. Shakhmatov) developed the idea of ​​two Slavic ancestral homelands: the area within which the Proto-Slavic language developed (“the first ancestral home”), and the area that the Proto-Slavic tribes occupied on the eve of settlement in the Central and Eastern Europe ("second ancestral home") and which, in his opinion, was in the Vistula basin.

In the definition of the "first ancestral home" A. A. Shakhmatov hesitated; however, it must be borne in mind that it could not be significantly removed from the “second ancestral home”: there is no doubt that the Proto-Slavic language was formed from the Indo-European dialects of central Europe, therefore, within the territory that is occupied by the Slavs at the present time.

It is on the basis of the conclusion about the autochthonous nature of the Slavs that extensive archaeological searches have been conducted in recent decades. Thanks to them, the features of the life and life of the Slavs of the initial period of settlement from the "second ancestral home" are now well known. They are represented by archaeological monuments of the so-called Prague-Korchak type of the 5th-61th centuries. n. e., the territory of distribution of which completely coincides with the proposed area of ​​​​the late Proto-Slavic settlements. Somewhere within this territory, it should have been long before the middle of the 1st millennium AD. e. an association of tribes was formed, the language of which gradually became Proto-Slavic.

5. PRO-SLAVIC LANGUAGE

Slavic languages ​​go back to the same source. This common Slavic ancestor language is conditionally called Proto-Slavic; conditionally because it is not known how the people who spoke this language called themselves in ancient times.

Although the Proto-Slavic language existed for a very long time and no written texts remained of it, nevertheless, we have a fairly complete picture of it. We know how its sound system developed, we know its morphology and the basic fund of the vocabulary, which is inherited from the Proto-Slavic by all Slavic languages. Our knowledge is based on the results of a comparative historical study of the Slavic languages: it allows us to restore the original appearance (protoform) of each studied linguistic fact. The reality of the restored (original) Proto-Slavic form can be verified and refined by the testimony of other Indo-European languages. Especially often correspondences to Slavic words and forms are found in the Baltic languages, for example, in Lithuanian. This can be illustrated by the roots, which include combinations of sounds that changed in different ways in different Slavic languages ​​after the collapse of Proto-Slavic, but remained unchanged in the Lithuanian language.

Many words are common to all Slavic languages, therefore, they were already known to the Proto-Slavic language. The common protoform for them has undergone unequal changes in different Slavic languages; and the design of these words in Lithuanian (and in other Indo-European languages) suggests that the original vowel was in all roots before I or r. "a°n, *golv-a, *kolt-iti, *vort-a, *gord-b, *korva. The established relationships allow us to formulate a historical phonetic law, according to which it is possible to reconstruct in all other similar cases ( presumably restore) the original proto-form: Russian norov, Bulgarian temper, etc. give grounds for the reconstruction of the Proto-Slavic *pogu-b (compare the Lithuanian narv-ytis - "stubborn"), peas, grah, etc. - Proto-Slavic *gorx- b (compare the Lithuanian garb "a - a type of grass), etc. It is in this way that the appearance of the collapsed Proto-Slavic language is restored.

One can speak of Proto-Slavic as a kind of Indo-European language insofar as it is characterized by a complex of features inherent only to it and combined with a series of features known to one degree or another to other languages ​​of Europe and South Asia.

At some stage in their life, a group of European tribes who spoke dialects close to the ancient Baltic, Iranian, Balkan, German, united into a fairly strong alliance, within which for a long time there was a convergence (leveling, alignment) of dialects necessary to develop mutual understanding. between members of a tribal union. It can be assumed that in the I millennium BC. e. an Indo-European language already existed, characterized by features subsequently known only to Slavic languages, which allows us, modern researchers, to call it Proto-Slavic.

The originality of the Proto-Slavic language is largely due to the fact that its historical changes were determined by development trends inherent only to it. The most common of these was the tendency to syllabic articulation of speech. At a late stage in the development of the Proto-Slavic language, a single-type structure of syllables was formed, leading to the restructuring of former syllables in such a way that they all ended in vowels.

The Proto-Slavic language existed until the middle of the 1st millennium AD. e., when the tribes who spoke it, having settled in the vast territories of the Central, Eastern and South of Eastern Europe begin to lose contact with each other. The language of each of the isolated groups of tribes continued to develop in isolation from others, acquiring new sound, grammatical and lexical features. This is the usual way of forming “related” languages ​​from a single source language (proto-language), noticed by F. Engels, who wrote: “Tribes, dismembering, turn into peoples, into whole groups of tribes ... languages ​​change, becoming not only mutually incomprehensible but also losing almost every trace of the original unity.

6. BALTOS-SLAVIC COMMUNITY

In the family of Indo-European languages, the Slavic and Baltic languages ​​are especially close to each other. The latter include modern Lithuanian and Latvian (the so-called Eastern Baltic) and dead (disappeared at different times) languages ​​of ancient tribes that lived in the forest zone of Eastern Europe from the upper reaches of the Oka River to the southern Baltic.

The proximity of the Baltic and Slavic languages ​​is manifested in regular sound correspondences, in the similarity of forms of inflection and word formation, in the commonality of most words denoting the world, people, their relations and activities in the conditions of the communal-tribal system. At the same time, the historically original Proto-Slavic (see Proto-Slavonic language) word formation, restored for the Slavic languages, as a rule, coincides with their formation in the historically attested Baltic languages. For example, restoring the protoform *sun-us for Slavic son (Old Russian son), we find it in Lithuanian sun-us, etc. In a very large number of cases, therefore, Slavic words and forms look like converted Baltic ones. These unique relationships within the Indo-European family between languages ​​belonging to different groups have not yet received a generally accepted historical explanation.

In the middle of the 19th century, when a “family tree” scheme appeared in linguistics, explaining the origin of “related” languages ​​​​by the successive division of the parent language (see Proto-language) into separate languages, it was believed that a single Balto-Slavic parent language stood out first, which later broke up into Proto-Slavic and Baltic. This idea of ​​the origin of the Slavic and Baltic languages ​​from their common ancestral language existed in science for almost a century - until the beginning or middle of the 20th century. It was at this time that the idea of ​​the complexity of the process of formation of "related" languages ​​began to form; it was supposed to include not only the disintegration, but also the convergence of "languages ​​as a result of the creation of multilingual tribal unions. The first to doubt the reality of the Balto-Slavic proto-language and substantiate his doubts in 1911 was J. Endzelin, a well-known Latvian linguist.

Since the Baltic and Slavic languages, along with very prominent common features, are also characterized by very significant differences, the idea of ​​the Balto-Slavic community (or community) began to develop in science, which consists in the fact that the Proto-Slavic and Proto-Baltic languages, which originally belonged to different Indo-European groups, being for a very long time direct "neighbors", became close, developing a set of common features for them. New research has shown that the so-called Balto-Slavic problem (that is, the problem of ancient relations between these two language groups) also requires the solution of the issue of historical relations between the East and West Baltic languages, which in turn are characterized by very ancient differences that do not allow elevate all the Baltic languages ​​to an absolutely single source - the Proto-Baltic language. Proponents of the idea of ​​the Balto-Slavic community explain these relations by the origin of the Western Baltic languages ​​as a result of the convergence of part of the original Proto-Slavic dialects with the East Baltic ones or, conversely, the convergence of parts of the ancient East Baltic dialects with Proto-Slavic. Such an explanation takes into account that the Western Baltic languages ​​in their features are, as it were, intermediate (or transitional), that is, they are similar in some features to the Eastern Baltic, and in others to the Proto-Slavic language (Fig. 2.).

In recent decades, serious attempts have been made to generalize the relationship between the Indo-European languages. Studies have shown that the most ancient features equally unite both Proto-Slavic and Baltic languages ​​with Asian Indo-European languages, with Balkan (Thracian and Illyrian), which disappeared at the beginning of a new era (from these languages ​​in the mountains on the coast Adriatic Sea only the Albanian language survived), as well as with the Germanic languages. At the same time, the Proto-Slavic language is characterized by a significant set of features that bring it closer to the Western Iranian languages, to which, as is commonly believed, the language of the Scythians belonged; these features are unknown to the Baltic languages. Based on this evidence, it is suggested that the Proto-Slavic language union, which eventually took shape in the Proto-Slavic language, mainly consisted of dialects, some of which were preserved on the Baltic outskirts of the once vast region of their distribution. The final separation of the Proto-Slavic language from the Old Baltic dialects occurred after its rapprochement with the Western Ira by a certain speech of the Scythians who dominated the Northern Black Sea region in the middle of the 1st millennium BC. e.

Rice. 2. Balto-Slavic community.

The formation of the Proto-Slavic as a kind of Indo-European language was not connected with the geographical gap between the Proto-Slavs and the ancient Balts: a significant part of the Proto-Slavic tribes continued to live along the borders of the ancient Baltic settlements. Archaeologists note that these settlements existed from the beginning of the 1st millennium BC. e. until the second half of the 1st millennium AD. e. almost unchanged. At the end of the 1st millennium BC. e. in the Middle Dnieper, an extensive tribal union is formed, which left archaeological monuments of the 2nd century BC. BC e.- II-IV centuries. n. e., known as the Zarubintsy culture. The creators of this culture, as is commonly believed in last years, spoke dialects of the Proto-Slavic and Western Baltic type. A group of tribes of this association later moved up the Desna River and created settlements in the upper reaches of the Oka River, which received the name of the Moshchin culture in archeology. As evidenced by hydronymic data (names of rivers and lakes), this group of tribes spoke the Western Baltic language. And the Vyatichi who lived on the territory of the Moshchin settlements in ancient Russian times (IX-XI centuries) differed so noticeably from the surrounding Slavic-speaking population that the chronicler did not consider them Slavs, just like the Radimichi (by the way, they also lived in the territory where they still names of rivers of Western Baltic origin are preserved).

In the second half of the 1st millennium AD. e., in the era of the formation of the Old Russian state association, the Balto-speaking population of the central forest zone was intensively Slavicized, that is, included in the composition of the Old Russian nationality, only for western outskirts preserving the Baltic speech of their ancestors (the descendants of this population are modern Lithuanians and Latvians).

August Schleicher is an outstanding German Indo-European linguist. For the first time, he began to widely introduce data from the Slavic and Baltic languages ​​into comparative historical research, and was the actual creator of comparative historical Lithuanism (the science of the Lithuanian language). A. Schleicher believed that the history and laws of the development of specific languages ​​can be studied as objectively as the laws of life of living organisms. The successes of the natural sciences, and in particular the ideas of Darwinism, had a great influence on Schleicher's worldview, which explains his love for natural science terms transferred to linguistics (the "organism" of the language, language "families", "branches", "family tree", etc. .), imitation of natural scientists in research methods. Schleicher believed that the inflectional structure of the ancient Indo-European languages ​​​​(and the common Indo-European proto-language) developed gradually and has the same "prehistory, as, for example, in biology, complex multicellular organisms of animals and plants, erected to the simplest unicellular ancestors. Schleicher considered the simplest type of language to be isolating, when individual roots or combinations of roots are placed in a certain order, and morphological forms indicating the connection of words in a sentence are absent in the language, as, for example, in Vietnamese.A more complex type - agglutinative (literally "gluing") - arose through evolution from the isolating one (as, for example, in the Finno-Ugric or Turkic languages, various kinds of grammatical indicators are mechanically "glued" to the roots, which originated from auxiliary, and originally from independent full-meaning root words). closely fused with the root, the root is never in appears in isolation, it is always accompanied by inflections (the richest inflections are presented in Sanskrit). These periods of formation and improvement of the linguistic organism belong to prehistory; A. Schleicher considered the actual historical stages as a period of disintegration, destruction of the linguistic organism: an aging language begins to simplify and lose its originally rich inflections, sound changes destroy the appearance of the original root.

These changes in different dialects of the common Indo-European proto-language occur in different ways, and the further the carriers of the Indo-European dialects moved away from the original ancestral home, the more the language organism itself underwent decay. So, from the dialects of the common Indo-European parent language, as a result of its collapse, separate Indo-European languages ​​arose; the farther they are from the Indo-European ancestral home (which Schleicher assumed in Central Asia), the less ancient Indo-European inflections are preserved in the language. Sanskrit and the Bactrian (Avestan) language are closest both territorially and in their rich structure to the common Indo-European inflectional type. The Indo-Europeans, who left their ancestral home by the southern route, gave rise to Greek, Latin (which has undergone more changes and, therefore, is poorer than Greek), Celtic (having reached the Atlantic coast, the Celts almost lost their ancient inflections). Indo-Europeans who left their ancestral home north way, gave rise to the Slavs (in whose language the old case and verb inflections are still preserved) and Lithuanians (where a rich declension is also preserved), the ancestors of the Germans went further west (the westward the German language is located, the less old forms it has preserved: English is completely lost cases). The most complete theory of A. Schleicher is set forth in his posthumously published work Compendium (i.e., summary) of the comparative grammar of the Indo-European languages. A. Schleicher left behind many students (G. Curtius, A. Leskin, I. Schmidt, G. Schuhardt), who created their scientific works, discarding elements of primitive biologism and developing the most valuable ideas of their teacher - about the objectivity and cognizability of the laws of language changes, about the systemic nature of the linguistic "organism".

CONCLUSION

The study of linguistic kinship belongs to the field of comparative historical linguistics. The method of comparative historical linguistics involves such a comparison of languages, which is aimed at clarifying their historical past. Using the comparative-historical method, scientists compare genetically identical words and forms of related languages ​​and restore (of course, presumably “under an asterisk”) their original form, their archetypes, or proto-forms. The result is a rough reconstruction of at least certain aspects of the linguistic structure, as it was before the separation of the respective languages ​​or branches of languages. Thus, a directed comparison in a certain way makes it possible to expand the scope of historical research, to penetrate into those epochs of the life of the language, from which there was no direct evidence in the form of written monuments.

For example, none of the Slavic languages ​​preserved the ending -s in the nominative case of the singular of masculine nouns, but at an early stage in the history of Proto-Slavic, when its separation from the rest of the Indo-European languages ​​began, such an ending undoubtedly existed, as the coinciding facts of a number of branches of the Indo-European family. Wed Russian wolf, Ukrainian vovk, czech, vik, polsk. Wilk, Bulgarian Valk, Serbo-Chorv. wuk, st.-el. vlk from Lithuanian. vilkas, Latvian, ullks, other Nnd. vrkah (where h< s), др.-греч. lykos, готск. wulfs (все с тем же значением) или русск. сын, чешек., польск. syn, укр., болг. син, ст.-ел. сынъ с литов. sunns, древнепрусск. souns, др.-инд. sunuh, готск. sunus, др.-греч. hyios (все со значением «сын»). Утрата на славянской почве окончания -s (как и других окон­чаний на согласный) была связана с более общей закономерностью, действовавшей в праславянском, с законом открытого слога, по кото­рому все закрытые слоги так или иначе превращались в открытые.

In its reconstructions, comparative historical linguistics relies on the unequal development of related languages, on differences in the nature and direction of language changes, as well as in the pace of development of processes directed in one direction. Usually, from the common heritage, one thing is preserved in a relatively unchanged form in one part of related languages, something else - in another; by collecting these relics of the past, the researcher recreates the original picture. Where the development turns out to be more or less the same in all related languages, the method of comparative historical reconstruction does not have the necessary “hook”. This significantly limits its capabilities. After all, related languages ​​are often similar not only in inherited material, but also in development trends: independently of each other, they develop forms that are difficult to distinguish from inherited ones. Sometimes, even with the unequal development in individual languages ​​or branches, it is not easy to distinguish surviving relics from later innovations. Thus, for a long time it was believed that the system of the ancient Greek and ancient Indian verb, rich in synthetic forms, better represents the ancient Indo-European state than the verb systems of other branches that have experienced various losses and simplifications. But after the discovery and decoding at the beginning of the 20th century. texts of the Hittite language, in many ways very archaic, this provision has been revised. It became clear that the ancient Greek and ancient Indian systems reflect a number of common dialectal innovations of the Indo-European proto-language, which did not affect those of its dialects on the basis of which the Hittite was formed.

The objective difficulties of reconstructing the proto-linguistic state lead to the fact that the reconstructed picture is full of “blank spots” here and there, and some parts of this picture turn out to be contradictory. As a result of the reconstruction, we get, in fact, not a language that actually existed at some period of time, but rather only a certain set of linguistic facts that existed partly simultaneously, partly non-simultaneously and united only by the fact that each of them is captured in the most ancient, accessible to our knowledge. condition.

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See in TSB (3rd ed.) maps "Languages ​​of the peoples of the world" (vol. 30, insert between p. 480 and 481) and "Peoples of the USSR" (vol. 24, book 2, insert between p. 32 and 33), as well as the Atlas of the Peoples of the World / Ed. S. I. Bruk, V. S. Apenchenko. M., 1964.

Dolgopolsky A.B. In search of a distant relationship. "Russian speech", No. 6, 1967.

Linguistics. Big encyclopedic dictionary. M., 1998, S. 237.

Cit. based on the book: Kodukhov V.I. Introduction to linguistics. M., 1987, S. 98.

Cheboksarova N.I. Peoples, races, cultures. M., 1971, S. 71.

Encyclopedic Dictionary of a Young Philologist. M., 1984. S. 253.

Maslov Yu.S. Introduction to linguistics. M., 1987, p.227.

In the Middle Ages, the question of the diversity of languages ​​​​became obvious, since the "barbarians" destroyed Rome and many "barbarian" languages ​​\u200b\u200b(Celtic, Germanic, Slavic, Turkic, etc.) entered the cultural arena, among which none could be considered "only" . However, the interaction of multilingual peoples in this era was limited either to military operations or everyday communication, which, of course, required to a certain extent the mastery of foreign languages, but did not lead to the systematic study of foreign languages.

Theoretical questions, due to the fact that education was in the hands of the church, were resolved only in accordance with the Bible, where the diversity of languages ​​was explained by the legend of tower of babel, according to which God "mixed" the languages ​​​​of the people who built this tower in order to prevent people from entering heaven. Belief in this legend survived until the 19th century. However, more sober minds tried to understand the diversity of languages, based on real data.

The impetus for posing this question in scientific terms was the practical tasks of the Renaissance, when it was necessary to theoretically comprehend the question of the composition and type of the national language, the exponent new culture, and its relationship with the literary languages ​​of the feudal Middle Ages, and thereby re-evaluate the ancient and other ancient heritage.

The search for raw materials and colonial markets pushed the representatives of the young bourgeois states to world travel. The era of "great travels and discoveries" introduced Europeans to the natives of Asia, Africa, America, Australia and Oceania.

The predatory policy of the first conquistadors towards the natives is replaced by systematic capitalist colonization in order to force the colonial population to work for their conquerors. To do this, it was necessary to communicate with the natives, to communicate with them, to influence them through religion and other ways of propaganda. All this required mutual understanding and thus the study and comparison of languages.

Thus, the various practical needs of the new era created the basis for the examination and registration of languages, the compilation of dictionaries, grammars and theoretical studies. In relation to the colonial languages, this role was assigned to monk missionaries who were sent to the newly discovered countries; the records of these missionaries were for a long time the only source of knowledge about a wide variety of languages.

As early as 1538, the work of Guilelmo Postellus (1510–1581) De affmitatae linguarum (On the Relationship of Languages) appeared.

The first attempt to establish groups of related languages ​​belonged to Joseph-Justus Scaliger (1540-1609), son of the famous Renaissance philologist Julius-Caesar Scaliger (1484-1558). In 1610, Scaliger’s work “Diatriba de europeorum linguis” (“Discourse on European Languages”, written in 1599) was published in France, where 11 “mother languages” are established within the European languages ​​known to the author: four “big” - Greek, Latin (with Romanesque), Teutonic (Germanic) and Slavic, and seven "small" ones - Epirote (Albanian), Irish, Cymrian (British) with Breton, Tatar, Finnish with Lappish, Hungarian and Basque. Despite the fact that the comparison was on the comparison of the word God in different languages ​​and that even the Latin and Greek names for God (deus, theos) did not lead Scaliger to think about the relationship of Greek with Latin, and he declared all 11 "mothers" "not related to each other by any ties of kinship", within the Romance and especially Germanic languages, the author managed to make subtle differences in the degree of kinship, indicating that only Germanic languages ​​are Water-languages ​​(the language itself is the mother and the Low German dialect), while others are Wasser-languages ​​(High German dialect), i.e. outlined the possibility of separating the Germanic languages ​​and German dialects on the basis of the movement of consonants, which was later developed in the works Ten-Cate, Rasmus Rusk and Jacob Grimm.

At the beginning of the XVII century. E. Guichard in his work "L" Harmonie etymologique des langues "(1606), despite fantastic comparisons of languages ​​and scripts, managed to show the family of Semitic languages, which was further developed by other Hebraists, such as Job Ludolf (1624-1704).

A wider classification, although largely inaccurate, but with a clear recognition of the concept of a family of languages, was given by the famous mathematician and philosopher Gottfried-Wilhelm Leibniz (1646-1716), dividing the languages ​​​​known to him into two large families with the division of one of them into two more groups:

I. Aramaic (i.e. Semitic).

II. Japhetic:

1. Scythian (Finnish, Turkic, Mongolian and Slavic).

2. Celtic (other European).

If in this classification we move the Slavic languages ​​​​to the “Celtic” group, and rename the “Scythian” languages ​​at least to the “Ural-Altaic”, then we will get what linguists came to in the 19th century.

In the 17th century a native of Croatia, Yuri Krizhanich (1617–1693), who lived for many years in Rus' (mainly in exile), gave the first example of comparing Slavic languages; this attempt is striking in its accuracy.

In the XVIII century. Lambert Ten-Cate (1674-1731) in his book "Aenleiding tot de Kenisse van het verhevende Deel der niederduitsche Sprocke" ("Introduction to the study of the noble part of the Low German language", 1723) made a thorough comparison of the Germanic languages ​​and established the most important sound correspondences of these related languages .

Of great importance among the predecessors of the comparative-historical method are the works of M.V. Lomonosov (1711-1765) "Russian Grammar" (1755), Preface "On the Usefulness of Church Books in Russian language"(1757) and the unfinished work "On native languages ​​​​of Russian and on current dialects", which gives a completely accurate classification of the three groups of Slavic languages ​​\u200b\u200bwith an indication of the great proximity of eastern to southern ones, shows on a number of words the correct etymological correspondences of single-root Slavic and Greek words, clarified the question of the degree of closeness of Russian dialects and the disunity of German dialects, of the place Old Church Slavonic and family relations between the languages ​​of the European part of the Indo-European languages ​​are outlined.

In fulfillment of the precepts of Leibniz, Peter I sent the Swede Philipp-Johann Stralenberg (1676–1750) captured near Poltava to Siberia to study the peoples and languages ​​that Stralenberg and

fulfilled. Returning to his homeland, in 1730 he published comparative tables of languages Northern Europe, Siberia and North Caucasus, which laid the foundation for the genealogical classification for many non-Indo-European languages, in particular Turkic.

In the XVIII century. in Russia, implementing the plans of Peter I, the first "Russian academicians" (Gmelin, Lepekhin, Pallas, etc.) were engaged in a broad and, as it is now commonly called, a comprehensive study of the lands and outskirts Russian Empire. They studied geographic and geological structure territories, climate, subsoil, population, including the languages ​​of a multi-tribal state.

This last was summed up in a large translation-comparative dictionary, published in the first edition in 1786-1787. It was the first dictionary of this type, published under the title "Comparative dictionaries of all languages ​​​​and dialects", where by translating Russian words into all available languages The "Catalogue of Languages" was compiled into 200 languages ​​of Europe and Asia. In 1791, the second edition of this dictionary was published with the addition of some languages ​​of Africa and America (272 languages ​​in total).

Materials for translations in these dictionaries were collected both by academicians and other workers Russian Academy, the editors were academician Pallas and Jankovich-de-Marievo, with the personal participation of Catherine II. Thus, this dictionary was given state significance.

The second similar dictionary was carried out by a Spanish missionary named Lorenzo Hervas y Panduro, who published the first (Italian) edition in 1784 under the title "Сatalogo delle lingue conosciute notizia della loro affunita e diversita" and the second (Spanish) - in 1800- 1805 under the title "Catalogo de las lenguas de las naciones concidas", where over 400 languages ​​were collected in six volumes with some references and information about certain languages.

The last such publication was the work of the Baltic Germans I. Kh. Adelung and I.S. Vater “Mithridates, oder allgemeine Sprachkunde” (“Mithridates, or General Linguistics”), published in 1806–1817, where the correct idea to show the differences of languages ​​in a coherent text was carried out by translating the prayer “Our Father” into 500 languages; for most of the world's languages, this is a fantastic artificial translation. In this edition big interest present comments on the translation and grammatical and other information, in particular W. Humboldt's note on the Basque language.

All these attempts to "catalogue languages", no matter how naive they were, nevertheless brought great benefits: they introduced real facts the diversity of languages ​​and the possibilities of similarities and differences of languages ​​within the same words, which contributed to the interest in the comparative comparison of languages ​​and enriched the actual knowledge of languages.

However, lexical comparisons alone, and even without any genuine historical theory, could not lead to the necessary scientific results. But the ground for the emergence of comparative linguistics was ready.

All that was needed was some kind of impetus that would suggest the correct ways to compare languages ​​and set the necessary goals for such studies.

Such a "push" was the discovery of Sanskrit, the literary language ancient india. Why could this "discovery" play such a role? The fact is that both in the Middle Ages and in the Renaissance, India was considered fairyland, full of miracles described in the old novel "Alexandria". Travels to India by Marco Polo (XIII century), Athanasius Nikitin (XV century) and the descriptions they left did not dispel the legends about the "country of gold and white elephants".

The first to notice the similarity of Indian words with Italian and Latin was Philippe Sasseti, an Italian traveler of the 16th century, as he reported in his Letters from India, but no scientific conclusions were drawn from these publications.

The question received a correct formulation only in the second half of the 18th century, when an institute was established in Calcutta oriental cultures and William Jonze (1746-1794), having studied Sanskrit manuscripts and familiarized himself with modern Indian languages, was able to write:

“The Sanskrit language, whatever its antiquity, has an amazing structure, more perfect than Greek, richer than Latin, and more beautiful than either of them, but bearing in itself such a close relationship with these two languages ​​as in roots of verbs, and in forms of grammar, which could not be generated by chance, the relationship is so strong that no philologist who would study these three languages ​​\u200b\u200bcan not believe that they all came from one common source, which, perhaps no longer exists. There is an analogous reason, though not so convincing, for supposing that both Gothic and Celtic, though mixed with quite different dialects, were of the same origin as Sanskrit; Ancient Persian could also be attributed to the same family of languages, if there were a place for discussing questions about Persian antiquities.

This laid the foundation for comparative linguistics, and the further development of science confirmed, although declarative, but correct statements of V. Jonze.

The main thing in his thoughts:

1) similarity not only in roots, but also in the forms of grammar cannot be the result of chance;

2) it is a kinship of languages ​​that go back to one common source;

3) this source, “perhaps no longer exists”;

4) in addition to Sanskrit, Greek and Latin, the Germanic, Celtic, and Iranian languages ​​also belong to the same family of languages.

At the beginning of the XIX century. independently from each other, different scientists various countries engaged in clarifying the relationship of languages ​​within a particular family and achieved remarkable results.

Franz Bopp (1791–1867) went straight from the statement of W. Jonze and studied the conjugation of the main verbs in Sanskrit, Greek, Latin and Gothic (1816) using the comparative method, comparing both roots and inflections, which was methodologically especially important, since correspondences roots and words are not enough to establish the relationship of languages; if the material design of inflections provides the same reliable criterion of sound correspondences - which cannot be attributed to borrowing or chance, since the system of grammatical inflections, as a rule, cannot be borrowed - then this serves as a guarantee of a correct understanding of the relationships of related languages. Although Bopp believed at the beginning of his activity that Sanskrit was the "proto-language" for the Indo-European languages, and although he later tried to include such alien languages ​​\u200b\u200bin the kindred circle of Indo-European languages ​​\u200b\u200bsuch as Malay and Caucasian, but also with his first work, and later, drawing on data Iranian, Slavic, Baltic languages ​​and the Armenian language, Bopp proved the declarative thesis of V. Jonze on a large surveyed material and wrote the first "Comparative grammar of the Indo-Germanic [Indo-European] languages" (1833).

The Danish scientist Rasmus-Christian Rask (1787-1832), who was ahead of F. Bopp, followed a different path. Rask emphasized in every possible way that lexical correspondences between languages ​​are not reliable, grammatical correspondences are much more important, because borrowing inflections, and inflections in particular, "never happens."

Starting his research with the Icelandic language, Rusk first of all compared it with other "Atlantic" languages: Greenlandic, Basque, Celtic - and denied their relationship (regarding the Celtic, Rask later changed his mind). Then Rask compared the Icelandic language (1st circle) with the closely related Norwegian and got the 2nd circle; this second circle he compared with other Scandinavian (Swedish, Danish) languages ​​(3rd circle), then with other Germanic (4th circle), and, finally, he compared the Germanic circle with other similar "circles" in search of "Thracian "(i.e. Indo-European) circle, comparing the Germanic data with the indications of the Greek and Latin languages.

Unfortunately, Rusk was not attracted to Sanskrit even after he had been to Russia and India; this narrowed his "circles" and impoverished his conclusions.

However, the involvement of Slavic and, in particular, the Baltic languages ​​significantly made up for these shortcomings.

A. Meillet (1866–1936) characterizes the comparison of the thoughts of F. Bopp and R. Rask as follows:

“Rusk is significantly inferior to Bopp in that he does not attract Sanskrit; but he points to the original identity of the converging languages, without being carried away by vain attempts to explain the original forms; he is content, for example, with the assertion that "every ending of the Icelandic language can be found more or less clearly in Greek and Latin," and in this respect his book is more scientific and less outdated than Bopp's writings. It should be pointed out that Rusk's work was published in 1818 in Danish and only in an abridged form was printed in German in 1822 (translated by I. S. Vater).

The third founder of the comparative method in linguistics was A. Kh. Vostokov (1781–1864).

Vostokov dealt only with the Slavic languages, and above all with the Old Church Slavonic language, whose place had to be determined in the circle of Slavic languages. Comparing the roots and grammatical forms of the living Slavic languages ​​with the data of the Old Slavonic language, Vostokov managed to unravel many incomprehensible facts of Old Slavonic written monuments before him. So, Vostokov is credited with unraveling the “mystery of the yus”, i.e. letters and And A, which he defined as denoting nasal vowels, based on the juxtaposition:

Vostokov was the first to point out the need to compare the data contained in the monuments of dead languages ​​with the facts of living languages ​​and dialects, which later became a prerequisite for the work of linguists in a comparative historical sense. This was a new word in the formation and development of the comparative historical method.

In addition, Vostokov, using the material of the Slavic languages, showed what the sound correspondences of related languages ​​are, such as, for example, the fate of combinations tj, dj in Slavic languages ​​(cf. Old Church Slavonic svђsha, Bulgarian light[svesht], Serbo-Croatian cbeha, Czech swice, Polish swieca, Russian candle - from common Slavic *svetja; and Old Church Slavonic, Bulgarian between, Serbo-Croatian mezha, Czech mez, Polish miedw, Russian boundary - from common Slavic *medza), correspondence to Russian full-vowel forms like city, head(cf. Old Slavonic grad, Bulgarian hail, Serbo-Croatian hail, Czech hrad- castle, kremlin, polish grod- from common Slavic *gordu; and Old Church Slavonic chapter, Bulgarian chapter, Serbo-Croatian chapter, Czech hiva, Polish gfowa- from common Slavic *golva etc.), as well as the method of reconstructing archetypes or proto-forms, i.e., original forms not attested by written monuments. Through the works of these scientists, the comparative method in linguistics was not only declared, but also shown in its methodology and technique.

Great merit in refining and strengthening this method on a large comparative material of Indo-European languages ​​belongs to August Friedrich Pott (1802-1887), who gave comparative etymological tables of Indo-European languages ​​and confirmed the importance of analyzing sound correspondences.

At this time, individual scientists describe in a new way the facts of certain related language groups and subgroups.

Such are the works of Johann-Caspar Zeiss (1806-1855) on the Celtic languages, Friedrich Dietz (1794-1876) on the Romance languages, Georg Curtius (1820-1885) on the Greek language, Jacob Grimm (1785-1868) on the Germanic languages, and in in particular on German, Theodor Benfeya (1818–1881) in Sanskrit, Frantishek Miklosic (1818–1891) in Slavic languages, August Schleicher (1821–1868) in Baltic languages ​​and German, F.I. Buslaev (1818–1897) in Russian and others.

Of particular importance for the verification and approval of the comparative historical method were the works of the novelistic school of F. Dietz. Although the use of the method of comparison and reconstruction of archetypes has become commonplace among comparative linguists, skeptics were legitimately puzzled by not seeing the actual verification of the new method. Romance brought this test with its research. The Romano-Latin archetypes, restored by the school of F. Dietz, were confirmed by written facts in the publications of Vulgar (folk) Latin, the language-ancestor of the Romance languages.

Thus, the reconstruction of the data obtained by the comparative-historical method was proved in fact.

To complete an outline of the development of comparative historical linguistics, one should also cover the second half of the 19th century.

If in the first third of the XIX century. scientists who developed the comparative method, as a rule, proceeded from idealistic romantic premises (the brothers Friedrich and August-Wilhelm Schlegel, Jacob Grimm, Wilhelm Humboldt), then by the middle of the century natural-scientific materialism became the leading direction.

Under the pen of the largest linguist of the 50-60s. XIX century, naturalist and Darwinist August Schleicher (1821–1868), the allegorical and metaphorical expressions of the Romantics: “the body of the language”, “youth, maturity and decline of the language”, “family of related languages” - acquire a direct meaning.

According to Schleicher, languages ​​are the same natural organisms as plants and animals, they are born, grow and die, they have the same pedigree and genealogy as all living beings. According to Schleicher, languages ​​do not develop, but grow, obeying the laws of nature.

If Bopp had a very vague idea of ​​the laws in relation to language and said that "one should not look for laws in languages ​​that could offer more staunch resistance than the banks of rivers and seas", then Schleicher was sure that "the life of linguistic organisms in general takes place according to certain laws with regular and gradual changes, "and he believed in the operation of" the same laws on the banks of the Seine and Po and on the banks of the Indus and the Ganges.

Based on the idea that “the life of a language is no different from the life of all other living organisms - plants and animals”, Schleicher creates his theory of the “family tree” , where both the common trunk and each branch are always divided in half, and raise languages ​​to their primary source - the parent language, the “primary organism”, in which symmetry, regularity should dominate, and all of it should be simple; therefore, Schleicher reconstructs vocalism on the model of Sanskrit, and consonantism on the model of Greek, unifying declensions and conjugations according to one model, since the variety of sounds and forms, according to Schleicher, is the result of the further growth of languages. As a result of his reconstructions, Schleicher even wrote a fable in the Indo-European parent language.

Schleicher published the result of his comparative historical research in 1861-1862 in a book entitled Compendium of Comparative Grammar of the Indo-Germanic Languages.

Later studies by Schleicher's students showed the inconsistency of his approach to comparing languages ​​and to reconstruction.

Firstly, it turned out that the “simplicity” of the sound composition and forms of the Indo-European languages ​​is the result of later eras, when the former rich vocalism in Sanskrit and the former rich consonantism in Greek were reduced. On the contrary, it turned out that the data of rich Greek vocalism and rich Sanskrit consonantism are more reliable ways to reconstruct the Indo-European proto-language (studies by Collitz and I. Schmidt, Ascoli and Fikk, Osthoff, Brugmann, Leskin, and later by F. de Saussure, F.F. Fortunatov, I.A. Baudouin de Courtenay and others).

Secondly, the original "uniformity of forms" of the Indo-European proto-language also turned out to be shaken by research in the field of the Baltic, Iranian and other Indo-European languages, since older languages ​​\u200b\u200bmay have been more diverse and "multi-form" than their historical descendants.

The "young grammarians", as Schleicher's students called themselves, opposed themselves to the "old grammarians", representatives of Schleicher's generation, and above all renounced the naturalistic dogma ("language is a natural organism"), which their teachers professed.

The neo-grammarists (Paul, Osthoff, Brugmann, Leskin and others) were neither romantics nor naturalists, but based their "unbelief in philosophy" on the positivism of Auguste Comte and on the associative psychology of Herbart. The “sober” philosophical, or rather emphatically anti-philosophical, position of the neo-grammarists does not deserve due respect. But the practical results of the linguistic research of this numerous galaxy of scientists from different countries turned out to be very relevant.

In this school, the slogan was proclaimed that phonetic laws (see Chapter VII, § 85) do not act everywhere and always in the same way (as Schleicher thought), but within given language(or dialect) and in a certain era.

The works of K. Werner (1846-1896) showed that deviations and exceptions of phonetic laws are themselves due to the action of other phonetic laws. Therefore, as K. Werner said, “there must be, so to speak, a rule for incorrectness, you just need to open it.”

In addition (in the works of Baudouin de Courtenay, Osthoff, and especially in the works of G. Paul), it was shown that analogy is the same regularity in the development of languages ​​as phonetic laws.

The exceptionally subtle works on the reconstruction of archetypes by F. F. Fortunatov and F. de Saussure once again showed the scientific power of the comparative historical method.

All these works were based on comparisons of various morphemes and forms of Indo-European languages. special attention was given to the structure of Indo-European roots, which in the era of Schleicher, in accordance with the Indian theory of "ups", were considered in three forms: normal, for example vid, in the first step of the ascent - (guna) ved and in the second step (vrddhi) vayd, as a system of complication of a simple primary root. In the light of new discoveries in the field of vocalism and consonantism of the Indo-European languages, the existing correspondences and differences in the sound design of the same roots in different groups of Indo-European languages ​​and in individual languages, as well as taking into account the conditions of stress and possible sound changes, the question of Indo-European roots was put differently. : the most complete form of the root was taken as primary, consisting of consonants and a diphthongic combination (syllabic vowel plus i,And , n , T,r,l); due to reduction (which is associated with accentology), weakened variants of the root at the 1st step could also arise: i, and,n, T,r, l without a vowel, and further, on the 2nd degree: zero instead of i , And or and, t,r, l non-syllabic. However, this did not fully explain some of the phenomena associated with the so-called “Shwa Indogermanicum”, i.e. with an indefinite faint sound, which was portrayed as ?.

F. de Saussure in his work "Memoire sur Ie systeme primitif des voyelles dans les langues indoeuropeennes", 1879, exploring various correspondences in the alternations of the root vowels of the Indo-European languages, came to the conclusion that and uh could be a non-syllabic element of diphthongs, and in the case of a complete reduction of the syllabic element, it could become a syllabic element. But since this kind of "sonantic coefficients" was given in various Indo-European languages, then e, That a, That oh, it was to be assumed that the "seams" themselves had a different appearance: ? 1 , ? 2 , ? 3. Saussure himself did not draw all the conclusions, but suggested that the "algebraically" expressed "sonantic coefficients" A And ABOUT corresponded to sound elements that were once inaccessible directly from the reconstruction, the “arithmetic” explanation of which is still impossible.

After the texts of Vulgar Latin confirmed Romanesque reconstructions in the era of F. Dietz, this was the second triumph of the comparative historical method associated with direct foresight, since after deciphering in the 20th century. Hittite cuneiform monuments turned out that in the disappeared by the first millennium BC. e. In the Hittite (non-Sith) language, these "sound elements" are preserved and they are defined as "laryngeal", denoted h, and in other Indo-European languages ​​the combination he gave e, ho gave b, a eh > e, oh > o / a, whence we have the alternation of long vowels in the roots. In science, this set of ideas is known as the "laryngeal hypothesis". The number of disappeared "laryngeal" is calculated differently by different scientists.

F. Engels wrote about the comparative-historical method in Anti-Dühring.

“But since Herr Dühring deletes all modern historical grammar from his curriculum, then for teaching the language he is left with only old-fashioned, dissected in the style of old classical philology, technical grammar with all its casuistry and arbitrariness due to the lack of a historical foundation. His hatred of the old philology leads him to elevate its worst product to the rank of "the central point of the truly educational study of languages." It is clear that we are dealing with a philologist who has never heard anything about historical linguistics, which over the past 60 years has received such a powerful and fruitful development - and therefore Herr Dühring is looking for "highly modern educational elements" of the study of languages ​​not Bopp, Grimm and Dietz, and Heise and Becker of blessed memory. Somewhat earlier in the same work, F. Engels pointed out: “Matter and form mother tongue"become understandable only when its emergence and gradual development are traced, and this is impossible if one does not pay attention, firstly, to its own dead forms and, secondly, to related living and dead languages" .

Of course, these statements do not cancel the need for descriptive, and not historical, grammars, which are needed primarily in school, but it is clear that it would be impossible to build such grammars on the basis of "the blessed memory of Heise and Becker", and Engels very accurately pointed out the gap "school grammatical wisdom" of that time and the advanced science of that era, which developed under the sign of historicism, unknown to the previous generation.

For comparative linguists of the late XIX - early XX century. the "proto-language" is gradually becoming not the desired, but only a technical means of studying the real existing languages, which is clearly formulated by the student of F. de Saussure and the young grammarians - Antoine Meillet (1866–1936).

"The comparative grammar of the Indo-European languages ​​is in the same position as the comparative grammar of the Romance languages ​​would be if Latin were not known: the only reality it deals with is the correspondences between the attested languages"; “Two languages ​​are said to be related when they are both the result of two different evolutions of the same language that was in use before. The totality of related languages ​​constitutes the so-called language family" , "the method of comparative grammar is applicable not to restore the Indo-European language in the form in which it was spoken, but only to establish a certain system of correspondences between historically attested languages" . "The totality of these correspondences constitutes what is called the Indo-European language".

In these reasonings of A. Meillet, despite their sobriety and reasonableness, two features characteristic of positivism of the late 19th century were affected: firstly, the fear of broader and bolder constructions, the rejection of attempts to research going back centuries (which is not was afraid of the teacher A. Meillet - F. de Saussure, who ingeniously outlined the "laryngeal hypothesis"), and, secondly, anti-historicism. If one does not recognize the real existence of the base language as the source of the existence of related languages ​​that continue it in the future, then in general one should abandon the entire concept of the comparative historical method; if one accepts, as Meillet says, that “two languages ​​are said to be related when they are both the result of two different evolutions of the same language that was in use before”, then one should try to investigate this “previously used source language” , using both the data of living languages ​​and dialects, and the testimony of ancient written monuments and using all the possibilities of correct reconstructions, taking into account the data of the development of the people, the bearer of these linguistic facts.

If it is impossible to completely reconstruct the base language, then it is possible to achieve the reconstruction of its grammatical and phonetic structure and, to some extent, the basic fund of its vocabulary.

What is the attitude of Soviet linguistics to the comparative historical method and to the genealogical classification of languages ​​as a conclusion from comparative historical studies of languages?

1) The related commonality of languages ​​follows from the fact that such languages ​​originate from one base language (or group parent language) through its disintegration due to the fragmentation of the carrier collective. However, this is a long and contradictory process, and not a consequence of the “splitting of a branch in two” of a given language, as A. Schleicher thought. Thus, the study of the historical development of a given language or a group of given languages ​​is possible only against the background of the historical fate of the population that was the bearer of a given language or dialect.

2) The basis language is not only a “set of ... correspondences” (Meie), but a real, historically existing language that cannot be completely restored, but the basic data of its phonetics, grammar and vocabulary (to the least) can be restored, which was brilliantly confirmed by the data the Hittite language in relation to the algebraic reconstruction of F. de Saussure; behind the set of correspondences, the position of the reconstructive model should be preserved.

3) What and how can and should be compared in the comparative-historical study of languages?

a) It is necessary to compare words, but not only words and not all words, and not according to their random consonances.

The “coincidence” of words in different languages ​​with the same or similar sound and meaning cannot prove anything, since, firstly, this may be the result of borrowing (for example, the presence of the word factory as fabrique, fabrik, fabriq etc. in a variety of languages) or the result of a random coincidence: “so, in English and in New Persian the same combination of articulations bad means "bad", and yet the Persian word has nothing to do with the English: it is pure "play of nature." "Cumulative Consideration English vocabulary and New Persian vocabulary shows that no conclusions can be drawn from this fact.

b) You can and should take the words of the compared languages, but only those that can historically belong to the era of the “base language”. Since the existence of a language-base should be assumed in the communal-clan system, it is clear that the artificially created word of the era of capitalism factory not suitable for this. What words are suitable for such a comparison? First of all, kinship names, these words in that distant era were the most important for determining the structure of society, some of them have survived to this day as elements of the main vocabulary of related languages (mother, brother, sister) part has already “been in circulation”, i.e., it has moved into a passive dictionary (brother-in-law, daughter-in-law, yatry), but for comparative analysis both those and other words are suitable; For example, yatry, or yatrov, -“brother-in-law’s wife” is a word that has parallels in Old Church Slavonic, Serbian, Slovenian, Czech and Polish, where jetrew and earlier jetry show the nasal vowel that links this root to words womb, inside, inside[values] , with French enrailles and so on.

Numerals (up to ten), some primordial pronouns, words denoting parts of the body, and then the names of some animals, plants, tools are also suitable for comparison, but there may be significant differences between languages, since during migrations and communication with other peoples, one word could be lost, others could be replaced by strangers (for example, horse instead of horse), others are simply borrowed.

The table on p. 406, shows lexical and phonetic correspondences in various Indo-European languages ​​under the headings of the indicated words.

4) Some "coincidences" of the roots of words or even words are not enough to clarify the relationship of languages; as in the 18th century. W. Johns wrote, “coincidences” are also necessary in the grammatical design of words. We are talking about grammatical design, and not about the presence in languages ​​of the same or similar grammatical categories. Thus, the category of the verb aspect is clearly expressed in the Slavic languages ​​and in some African languages; however, this is expressed materially (in the sense of grammatical methods and sound design) in completely different ways. Therefore, on the basis of this “coincidence” between these languages, there can be no talk of kinship.

But if the same grammatical meanings are expressed in languages ​​in the same way and in the corresponding sound design, then this indicates more than anything about the relationship of these languages, for example:

where not only roots, but also grammatical inflections – ut, - wait , - anti, -onti, -unt, -and correspond exactly to each other and go back to one common source [although the meaning of this word in other languages ​​differs from the Slavic ones - “to carry”].

The importance of the criterion of grammatical correspondences lies in the fact that if it is possible to borrow words (which happens most often), sometimes grammatical patterns of words (associated with certain derivational affixes), then inflectional forms, as a rule, cannot be borrowed. Therefore, a comparative comparison of case and verb-personal inflections most likely leads to the desired result.

5) When comparing languages, the sound design of the compared language plays a very important role. Without comparative phonetics there can be no comparative linguistics. As already mentioned above, the complete sound coincidence of the forms of words in different languages ​​cannot show and prove anything. On the contrary, partial coincidence of sounds and partial divergence, subject to regular sound correspondences, may be the most reliable criterion for the relationship of languages. When comparing the Latin form ferunt and Russian take at first glance it is difficult to find common ground. But if we make sure that the initial Slavic b in Latin regularly corresponds f (brother - frater, bean - faba, take -ferunt etc.), then the sound correspondence of the initial Latin f Slavonic b becomes clear. As for inflections, the correspondence of the Russian at before the consonant of Old Slavonic and Old Russian and (i.e. nasal O ) in the presence of combinations vowel + nasal consonant + consonant (or at the end of a word) in other Indo-European languages, since such combinations in these languages ​​did not give nasal vowels, but were preserved in the form - unt, - ont(i),-and and so on.

The establishment of regular "sound correspondences" is one of the first rules of the comparative-historical method of studying related languages.

6) As for the meanings of the compared words, they also do not have to coincide completely, but may diverge according to the laws of polysemy.

So, in Slavic languages city, hail, grod etc. mean " locality certain type, and coast, brig, bryag, brzeg, breg etc. mean "shore", but the words corresponding to them in other related languages Garten And Berg(in German) means "garden" and "mountain". It's not hard to guess how *gord- originally "enclosed place" could have taken on the meaning of "garden", and *berg could get the meaning of any "shore" with or without a mountain, or, conversely, the meaning of any "mountain" near the water or without it. It happens that the meaning of the same words does not change when related languages ​​diverge (cf. Russian beard and the corresponding German Bart-"beard" or Russian head and the corresponding Lithuanian galva-"head", etc.).

7) When establishing sound correspondences, it is necessary to take into account historical sound changes, which, due to the internal laws of the development of each language, appear in the latter in the form of “phonetic laws” (see Chapter VII, § 85).

So, it is very tempting to compare the Russian word walk and Norwegian gate-"Street". However, this comparison does not give anything, as B. A. Serebrennikov correctly notes, since in the Germanic languages ​​\u200b\u200b(to which Norwegian belongs) voiced plosives (b,d, g) cannot be primary due to the “movement of consonants”, that is, the historically operating phonetic law. On the contrary, at first glance, such difficult-to-compare words as Russian wife and Norwegian kona, can easily be brought into line if you know that in the Scandinavian Germanic languages ​​[k] comes from [g], and in Slavic [g] in the position before the front vowels changed into [g], thereby the Norwegian kona and Russian wife ascend to the same word; cf. Greek gyne-“woman”, where neither movement of consonants, as in Germanic, nor “palatalization” of [g] in [g] before front vowels, as in Slavic, occurred.

If we know the phonetic laws of the development of these languages, then we cannot be “scared” by such comparisons as Russian I and Scandinavian ik or Russian one hundred and Greek hekaton.

8) How is the reconstruction of the archetype, or proto-form, carried out in the comparative-historical analysis of languages?

For this you need:

a) Match both root and affix elements of words.

b) Comparing the data of written monuments of dead languages ​​with the data of living languages ​​and dialects (testament of A. Kh. Vostokov).

c) Make a comparison according to the method of "expanding circles", i.e., proceeding from a comparison of closely related languages ​​to the kinship of groups and families (for example, compare Russian with Ukrainian, East Slavic languages ​​\u200b\u200bwith other groups of Slavic, Slavic with Baltic, Balto-Slavic - with other Indo-European ones (testament by R. Rask).

d) If we observe in closely related languages, for example, such a correspondence as Russian - head, Bulgarian - chapter, Polish - glowa(which is supported by other similar cases, like gold, gold, zloto, and crow, crow, wrona, and other regular correspondences), then the question arises: what kind of archetype (protoform) did these words of related languages ​​have? Hardly any of the above: these phenomena are parallel, and not ascending to each other. The key to solving this issue is, firstly, in comparison with other “circles” of related languages, for example, with Lithuanian galvd-"head", from German gold-"golden" or again with Lithuanian arn - “crow”, and secondly, in summing up this sound change (the fate of groups *tolt, tort in Slavic languages) under a more general law, in this case under the "law of open syllables", according to which in Slavic languages ​​sound groups O , e before [l], [r] between consonants should have given either “full vowel” (two vowels around or [r], as in Russian), or metathesis (as in Polish), or metathesis with vowel lengthening (whence O > A, as in Bulgarian).

9) In the comparative-historical study of languages, borrowings should be highlighted. On the one hand, they do not give anything comparative (see above about the word factory); on the other hand, borrowings, remaining in the same phonetic form in the borrowing language, can retain the archetype or, in general, the more ancient appearance of these roots and words, since the borrowing language did not undergo those phonetic changes that are characteristic of the language from which the borrowing originated. So, for example, the full-vowel Russian word oatmeal and a word that reflects the result of the disappearance of former nasal vowels, tow available in the form of ancient borrowing talkkuna And kuontalo in Finnish, where the form of these words is preserved, closer to the archetypes. Hungarian szalma-"straw" shows the ancient connections of the Ugrians (Hungarians) and the Eastern Slavs in the era before the formation of full-vowel combinations in the East Slavic languages ​​and confirms the reconstruction of the Russian word straw in common Slavonic form *solma .

10) Without a correct reconstruction technique, it is impossible to establish reliable etymologies. For the difficulties of establishing the correct etymology and the role of comparative-historical study of languages ​​and reconstruction, in particular in etymological studies, see the analysis of the etymology of the word millet in the course "Introduction to Linguistics" by L. A. Bulakhovsky (1953, p. 166).

The results of almost two hundred years of research into languages ​​using the method of comparative historical linguistics are summarized in the scheme of the genealogical classification of languages.

It has already been said above about the uneven knowledge of the languages ​​of different families. Therefore, some families, more studied, are set out in more detail, while other families, less known, are given in the form of drier lists.

Language families are divided into branches, groups, subgroups, sub-subgroups of related languages. Each stage of fragmentation unites closer languages ​​in comparison with the previous, more general one. Thus, the East Slavic languages ​​show a greater proximity than the Slavic languages ​​in general, and the Slavic languages ​​show a greater proximity than the Indo-European ones.

When listing languages ​​within a group and groups within a family, living languages ​​are listed first, and then dead ones.

The enumeration of languages ​​is accompanied by minimal geographical, historical and philological commentary.

I. INDO-EUROPEAN LANGUAGES

(over 96 living languages ​​in total)

1) Hindi and Urdu (sometimes combined common name Hindustani) - two varieties of one new Indian literary language; Urdu is the official language of Pakistan, written in the Arabic alphabet; Hindi (official language of India) - based on the Old Indian script Devanagari.

2) Bengal.

3) Punjabi.

4) Lahnda (landy).

5) Sindhi.

6) Rajasthani

7) Gujarati.

8) Marathi.

9) Sinhalese.

10) Nepali (Eastern Pahari, in Nepal).

11) B ihari.

12) Oriya (otherwise: Audrey, utkali, in eastern India).

13) Assamese.

14) Gypsy, separated as a result of resettlement and migrations in the 5th - 10th centuries. n. e.

15) Kashmiri and other Dardic languages.

16) Vedic - the language of the most ancient sacred books of the Indians - the Vedas, which developed in the first half of the second millennium BC. e. (recorded later).

17) Sanskrit t. The "classical" literary language of the ancient Indians from the 3rd century. BC e. to the 7th century n. e. (literally Sanskrit samskrta means "processed", as opposed to prakrta - "not normalized" colloquial); rich literature, religious and secular (epos, dramaturgy), remained in Sanskrit; the first Sanskrit grammar of the 4th c. BC e. Panini, revised in the 13th century. n. e. Vopadeva.

18) Pali is a Middle Indian literary and cult language of the medieval era.

19) Prakrits - various spoken Middle Indian dialects, from which the New Indian languages ​​\u200b\u200bcame; replicas of minor persons in Sanskrit dramaturgy are written on prakrits.

(more than 10 languages; finds the greatest proximity with the Indian group, with which it unites into a common Indo-Iranian, or Aryan, group;

arya - tribal self-name in the most ancient monuments, from it both wounds, and Alans - self-name of the Scythians)

1) Persian (Farsi) - writing based on the Arabic alphabet; for Old Persian and Middle Persian, see below.

2) Dari (Farsi-Kabuli) is the literary language of Afghanistan, along with Pashto.

3) Pashto (Pashto, Afghan) - a literary language, from the 30s. state language of Afghanistan.

4) Baloch (baluchi).

5) Tajik.

6) Kurdish.

7) Ossetian; dialects: Iron (Eastern) and Digor (Western). Ossetians are the descendants of the Alans-Scythians.

8) Tats - Tats are divided into Muslim Tats and "Mountain Jews".

9) Talysh.

10) Caspian (Gilyan, Mazanderan) dialects.

11) Pamir languages ​​(Shugnan, Rushan, Bartang, Capykol, Khuf, Oroshor, Yazgulyam, Ishkashim, Vakhan) are the non-written languages ​​of the Pamirs.

12) Yagnobsky.

13) Old Persian - the language of cuneiform inscriptions of the Achaemenid era (Darius, Xerxes, etc.) VI - IV centuries. BC e.

14) Avestan is another ancient Iranian language that has come down in the Middle Persian lists of the holy book "Avesta", which contains the religious texts of the cult of the Zoroastrians, the followers of Zarathushtra (in Greek: Zoroaster).

15) Pahlavi - Middle Persian language III - IX centuries. n. e., preserved in the translation of the "Avesta" (this translation is called "Zend", from where for a long time the Avestan language itself was incorrectly called Zend).

16) Median - a kind of northwestern Iranian dialects; no written monuments have been preserved.

17) Parthian is one of the Middle Persian languages ​​of the 3rd century. BC e. - III century. n. e., common in Parthia to the southeast of the Caspian Sea.

18) Sogdian - the language of Sogdiana in the Zeravshan valley, the first millennium AD. e.; ancestor of the Yaghnobi language.

19) Khorezmian - the language of Khorezm along the lower reaches of the Amu-Darya; the first - the beginning of the second millennium AD. e.

20) Scythian - the language of the Scythians (Alans), who lived in the steppes along north coast Black Sea and east to the borders of China in the first millennium BC. e. and the first millennium AD. e.; preserved in proper names in Greek transmission; ancestor of the Ossetian language.

21) Bactrian (Kushan) - the language of ancient Bactria according to upstream Amu-Darya, as well as the language of the Kushan Kingdom; the beginning of the first millennium AD

22) Saka (Khotanese) - in Central Asia and in Chinese Turkestan; from V - X centuries. n. e. texts written in the Indian Brahmi script remained.

Note. Most contemporary Iranian scholars subdivide the living and dead Iranian languages ​​into the following groups:

A. Western

1) Southwestern: ancient and middle Persian, modern Persian, Tajik, Tat and some others.

2) Northwestern: Median, Parthian, Baloch (Baluchi), Kurdish, Talysh and other Caspian.

B. Eastern

1) Southeastern: Saka (Khotanese), Pashto (Pashto), Pamir.

2) Northeastern: Scythian, Sogdian, Khorezmian, Ossetian, Yagnob.

3. Slavic group

A. Eastern subgroup

1) Russian; adverbs: northern (great) Russian - “surrounding” and southern (great) Russian - “aking”; The Russian literary language developed on the basis of the transitional dialects of Moscow and its environs, where from the south and southeast the Tula, Kursk, Oryol and Ryazan dialects spread features that were alien to the northern dialects, the former dialectal basis of the Moscow dialect, and displaced some of the features of the latter, as well as by mastering the elements of the Church Slavonic literary language; in addition, in the Russian literary language in the XVI-XVIII centuries. included various foreign language elements; writing based on the Russian alphabet, reworked from the Slavic - "Cyrillic" under Peter the Great; ancient monuments 11th century (they also apply to the Ukrainian and Belarusian languages); official language Russian Federation, between National language for communication between the peoples of the Russian Federation and adjacent territories former USSR, one of the world's languages.

2) Ukrainian (or Ukrainian; before the revolution of 1917 - Little Russian or Little Russian; three main dialects: northern, southeastern, southwestern; the literary language begins to take shape from the 14th century, the modern literary language has existed since the end of the 18th century. base of the Podneprovsky dialects of the southeastern dialect; writing based on the Cyrillic alphabet in its post-Petrine variety.

3) Belarusian; writing since the 14th century. based on Cyrillic. Dialects northeastern and southwestern; the literary language is based on the Central Belarusian dialects. B. Southern subgroup

4) Bulgarian - formed in the process of contacting Slavic dialects with the language of the Kama Bulgars, from where it got its name; writing based on the Cyrillic alphabet; ancient monuments from the tenth century. n. e.

5) Macedonian.

6) Serbo-Croatian; the Serbs have a Cyrillic script, the Croats have a Latin script; ancient monuments from the 12th century.

7) Slovenian; writing based on the Latin alphabet; the oldest monuments from the X-XI centuries.

8) Old Church Slavonic (or Old Church Slavonic) - the common literary language of the Slavs of the medieval period, which arose on the basis of the Thessalonica dialects of the Old Bulgarian language in connection with the introduction of writing for the Slavs (two alphabets: Glagolitic and Cyrillic) and the translation of church books to promote Christianity among the Slavs in IX –X centuries. n. e., among the Western Slavs was replaced by Latin in connection with Western influence and the transition to Catholicism; in the form of Church Slavonic - an integral element of the Russian literary language.

B. Western subgroup

9) Czech; writing based on the Latin alphabet; ancient monuments from the 13th century.

10) Slovak; writing based on the Latin alphabet.

11) Polish; writing based on the Latin alphabet; ancient monuments from the XIV century.

12) Kashubian; lost its independence and became a dialect of the Polish language.

13) Lusatian (abroad: Sorabian, Vendian); two options: Upper Lusatian (or Eastern and Lower Lusatian (or Western); writing based on the Latin alphabet.

14) Polabsky - died out in the 18th century, was distributed along both banks of the river. Labs (Elbes) in Germany.

15) Pomeranian dialects - died out in the medieval period due to forced Germanization; were distributed throughout south coast Baltic Sea in Pomerania (Pomerania).

4. Baltic group

1) Lithuanian; writing based on the Latin alphabet; monuments from the 14th century.

2) Latvian; writing based on the Latin alphabet; monuments from the 14th century.

4) Prussian - died out in the 17th century. in connection with forced Germanization; the territory of the former East Prussia; monuments of the XIV-XVII centuries.

5) Yatvyazh, Curonian and other languages ​​on the territory of Lithuania and Latvia, extinct by the 17th-18th centuries.

5. German group

A. North Germanic (Scandinavian) subgroup

1) Danish; writing based on the Latin alphabet; served as a literary language for Norway until the end of the 19th century.

2) Swedish; writing based on the Latin alphabet.

3) Norwegian; writing based on the Latin alphabet, originally Danish, since the literary language of the Norwegians until the end of the 19th century. was Danish. In modern Norway, there are two forms of the literary language: riksmol (otherwise: Bokmål) - bookish, closer to Danish, Ilansmol (otherwise: Nynorsk), closer to Norwegian dialects.

4) Icelandic; writing based on the Latin alphabet; written monuments from the 13th century. ("sagas").

5) Faroese.

B. West German subgroup

6) English; literary English language formed in the 16th century. n. e. based on the London dialect; 5th–11th centuries - Old English (or Anglo-Saxon), XI-XVI centuries. - Middle English and from the 16th century. - New English; writing based on the Latin alphabet (no changes); written monuments from the 7th century; language of international importance.

7) Dutch (Dutch) with Flemish; writing in Latin; in the Republic of South Africa live Boers, settlers from Holland, who speak a variety of the Dutch language, the Boer language (in other words: Afrikaans).

8) Frisian; monuments from the 14th century.

9) German; two adverbs; Low German (Northern, Niederdeutsch or Plattdeutsch) and High German (Southern, Hochdeutsch); the literary language developed on the basis of South German dialects, but with many northern features (especially in pronunciation), but still does not represent unity; in the VIII-XI centuries. - Old High German, in the XII-XV centuries. - Middle High German, from the 16th century. - New High German, developed in the Saxon offices and translations of Luther and his associates; writing based on the Latin alphabet in two varieties: Gothic and Antiqua; one of the largest languages ​​in the world.

10) And d and sh (or Yiddish, New Hebrew) - various High German dialects mixed with elements of Hebrew, Slavic and other languages.

B. East German subgroup

11) Gothic, which existed in two dialects. Visigothic - served the medieval Gothic state in Spain and Northern Italy; had a written language based on the Gothic alphabet, compiled by Bishop Wulfila in the 4th century. n. e. for the translation of the Gospel, which is the most ancient monument of the Germanic languages. Ostrogothic - the language of the Eastern Goths, who lived in the early Middle Ages on the Black Sea coast and in the southern Dnieper region; existed until the 16th century. in the Crimea, thanks to which a small dictionary compiled by the Dutch traveler Busbeck has been preserved.

12) Burgundian, Vandal, Gepid, Herul - the languages ​​of the ancient Germanic tribes in East Germany.

6. Romanesque group

(before the collapse of the Roman Empire and the formation of Romance languages ​​- Italian)

1) French; literary language developed by the 16th century. based on the Île-de-France dialect centered in Paris; French dialects were formed at the beginning of the Middle Ages as a result of the crossing of the popular (vulgar) Latin of the Roman conquerors and the language of the conquered Gaulish natives - Gallic; writing based on the Latin alphabet; the oldest monuments from the 9th century. n. e.; the middle French period from the 9th to the 15th centuries, the new French - from the 16th century. French became an international language earlier than other European languages.

2) Provencal (Occitan); the language of the national minority of southeastern France (Provence); as a literary one existed in the Middle Ages (the lyrics of the troubadours) and survived until the end of the 19th century.

3) Italian; the literary language developed on the basis of the Tuscan dialects, and in particular the dialect of Florence, which arose due to the crossing of vulgar Latin with the languages ​​\u200b\u200bof the mixed population of medieval Italy; writing in the Latin alphabet, historically - the first national language in Europe.

4) Sardinian (or Sardinian).

5) Spanish; formed in Europe as a result of crossing folk (vulgar) Latin with the languages ​​of the native population of the Roman province of Iberia; writing based on the Latin alphabet (the same applies to Catalan and Portuguese).

6) Galician.

7) Catalan.

8) Portuguese.

9) Romanian; formed as a result of crossing folk (vulgar) Latin and the languages ​​​​of the natives of the Roman province of Dacia; writing based on the Latin alphabet.

10) Moldavian (a kind of Romanian); writing based on the Russian alphabet.

11) Macedonian-Romanian (Aromunian).

12) Romansh - the language of the national minority; since 1938 it has been recognized as one of the four official languages ​​of Switzerland.

13) Creole languages ​​- crossed Romance with local languages ​​​​(Haitian, Mauritian, Seychelles, Senegalese, Papiamento, etc.).

Dead (Italian):

14) Latin - the literary state language of Rome in the republican and imperial era (III century BC - the first centuries of the Middle Ages); the language of rich literary monuments, epic, lyrical and dramatic, historical prose , legal documents and oratory; the oldest monuments from the VI century. BC e.; the first description of the Latin language in Varro, I century. BC e.; classical grammar of Donat - IV century. n. e.; the literary language of the Western European Middle Ages and the language catholic church; along with ancient Greek - a source of international terminology.

15) Medieval Vulgar Latin - folk Latin dialects of the early Middle Ages, which, when crossed with the native languages ​​​​of the Roman provinces of Gaul, Iberia , The Dacias, etc., gave rise to the Romance languages: French, Spanish, Portuguese, Romanian, etc.

16) Oscan, Umbrian, Sabel and other Italian dialects are preserved in fragmentary written monuments of the last centuries BC. e.

7. Celtic group

A. Goidel subgroup

1) Irish; written records from the 4th c. n. e. (ohmic writing) and from the 7th c. (on a Latin basis); is literary and at the present time.

2) Scottish (Gaelic).

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

B. Brythonic subgroup

4) Breton; Bretons (formerly Britons) moved after the arrival of the Anglo-Saxons from british isles to the European continent.

5) Welsh (Welsh).

6) Cornish; in Cornwall, a peninsula in southwestern England.

B. Gallic subgroup

7) Gallic; extinct since the era of education French; was distributed in Gaul, Northern Italy, the Balkans and even in Asia Minor.

8. Greek group

1) Modern Greek, from the XII century.

2) Ancient Greek, X century. BC e. – V c. n. e.; Ionic-Attic dialects from the 7th-6th centuries. BC e.; Achaean (Arcado-Cypriot) dialects from the 5th c. BC e., northeastern (Boeotian, Thessalian, Lesbos, Aeolian) dialects from the 7th century. BC e. and western (Dorian, Epirus, Cretan) dialects; the oldest monuments from the 9th century. BC e. (poems by Homer, epigraphy); from the 4th century BC e. a common literary language of Koine based on the Attic dialect centered in Athens; the language of rich literary monuments, epic, lyrical and dramatic, philosophical and historical prose; from III-II centuries. BC e. works of Alexandrian grammarians; along with Latin - a source of international terminology.

3) Middle Greek, or Byzantine, is the state literary language of Byzantium from the first centuries AD. e. until the 15th century; the language of monuments - historical, religious and artistic.

9. Albanian group

Albanian, written monuments based on the Latin alphabet from the 15th century.

10. Armenian group

Armenian; literary since the 5th century. n. e.; contains some elements dating back to the Caucasian languages; the ancient Armenian language - Grabar - is very different from the modern living Ashkharabar.

11. Hitto-Luvian (Anatolian) group

1) Hittite (Hittite-Nesit, known from cuneiform monuments of the 18th-13th centuries BC; the language of the Hittite state in Asia Minor.

2) Luvian in Asia Minor (XIV-XIII centuries BC).

3) Palai

4) Carian

5) Lydian Anatolian languages ​​of the ancient era.

6) Lycian

12. Tocharian group

1) Tocharian A (Turfan, Karashar) - in Chinese Turkestan (Xinjiang).

2) Tokharsky B (Kuchansky) - in the same place; in Kucha until the 7th century. n. e.

Known from manuscripts around the 5th-8th centuries. n. e. based on the Indian Brahmi script discovered during excavations in the 20th century.

Note 1. For a number of reasons, the following groups of Indo-European languages ​​converge: and ndo - Iranian (Aryan), Slavic - Baltic and Italo-Celtic.

Note 2. The Indo-Iranian and Slavo-Baltic languages ​​can be grouped under sat?m-languages, as opposed to the other kentom-languages; this division is carried out according to the fate of the Indo-European *g And *k mid-palatal, which in the first gave front-lingual fricatives (catam, simtas, sto - “hundred”), and in the second remained back-lingual plosives; in Germanic due to the movement of consonants - fricatives (hekaton, kentom(later centum), hundert etc. - "one hundred").

Note 3. The question of belonging to the Indo-European languages ​​​​of the Venetian, Messapian, obviously, the Illyrian group (in Italy), Phrygian, Thracian (in the Balkans) as a whole can be considered resolved; Pelasgian languages ​​(Peloponnese before the Greeks), Etruscan (in Italy before the Romans), Ligurian (in Gaul) have not yet been clarified in their relationship to the Indo-European languages.

A. Western group: Abkhazian-Adyghe languages

1. Abkhaz subgroup

1) Abkhazian; dialects: Bzybsky - northern and Abzhuysky (or Kadorsky) - southern; writing until 1954 on the basis of the Georgian alphabet, now - on the Russian basis.

2) Abaza; writing based on the Russian alphabet.

2 . Circassian subgroup

1) Adyghe.

2) Kabardian (Kabardino-Circassian).

3) Ubykh (Ubykhs emigrated to Turkey under tsarism).

B. Eastern group: Nakh-Dagestan languages

1. Nakh subgroup

1) Chechen is written on a Russian basis.

2) Ingush

3) Batsbi (tsova-tushinsky).

2. Dagestan subgroup

1) Avar.

2) Darginsky.

3) Laksky.

4) Lezginsky.

5) Tabasaran.

These five languages ​​are written on the basis of Russian. Other languages ​​are unwritten:

6) Andean.

7) Karatinsky.

8) Tindinsky.

9) Chamalinsky.

10) Bagvalinsky.

11) Ahvakhsky.

12) Botlikh.

13) Godoberinsky.

14) Tsezsky.

15) Bezhtinsky.

16) Khvarshinsky.

17) Gunzibsky.

18) Ginuhsky.

19) Tsakhursky.

20) Rutulsky.

21) Agulsky.

22) Archinsky.

23) Budukhsky.

24) Kryzsky.

25) Udinsky.

26) Khinalug.

3. Southern group: Kartvelian (Iberian) languages

1) Megrelian.

2) Laz (Chan).

3) Georgian: writing in the Georgian alphabet from the 5th century. n. e., rich literary monuments of the Middle Ages; dialects: Khevsurian, Kartli, Imeretian, Gurian, Kakhetian, Adjarian, etc.

4) Svansky.

Note. All languages ​​that have a written language (except Georgian and Ubykh) have it based on the Russian alphabet, and in the previous period for several years - on Latin.

III. OUTSIDE THE GROUP-BASQUE

IV. URAL LANGUAGES

1. FINNO-UGRIAN (UGRO-FINNISH) LANGUAGES

A. Ugric branch

1) Hungarian, writing on a Latin basis.

2) Mansi (Vogul); writing on a Russian basis (since the 30s of the XX century).

3) Khanty (Ostyak); writing on a Russian basis (since the 30s of the XX century).

B. Baltic-Finnish branch

1) Finnish (Suomi); writing based on the Latin alphabet.

2) Estonian; writing based on the Latin alphabet.

3) Izhora.

4) Karelian.

5) Vepsian.

6) Vodsky.

7) Livsky.

8) Sami (Saami, Lappish).

B. Perm branch

1) Komi-Zyryansky.

2) Komi-Permyak.

3) Udmurt.

G. Volga branch

1) Mari (Mari, Cheremis), dialects: upland on the right bank of the Volga and meadow - on the left.

2) Mordovian: two independent languages: Erzya and Moksha.

Note. Finnish and Estonian are written based on the Latin alphabet; in the Mari and Mordovians - for a long time on the basis of the Russian alphabet; in Komi-Zyryan, Udmurt and Komi-Perm - on the Russian basis (since the 30s of the XX century).

2. SAMOYED LANGUAGES

1) Nenets (Yurako-Samoyed).

2) Nganasan (Tavgian).

3) Enets (Yenisei - Samoyed).

4) Selkup (Ostyak-Samoyed).

Note. modern science considers the Samoyedic languages ​​to be related to the Finno-Ugric languages, which were previously considered as an isolated family and with which the Samoyedic languages ​​form a larger association - the Uralic languages.

1) Turkish (formerly Ottoman); writing since 1929 based on the Latin alphabet; until then, for several centuries - based on the Arabic alphabet.

2) Azerbaijani.

3) Turkmen.

4) Gagauz.

5) Crimean Tatar.

6) Karachay-Balkar.

7) Kumyk - was used as a common language for the Caucasian peoples of Dagestan.

8) Nogai.

9) Karaite.

10) Tatar, with three dialects - middle, western (Mishar) and eastern (Siberian).

11) Bashkir.

12) Altai (Oirot).

13) Shor with Kondom and Mras dialects.

14) Khakassian (with dialects of Sogai, Beltir, Kachin, Koibal, Kyzyl, Shor).

15) Tuva.

16) Yakut.

17) Dolgansky.

18) Kazakh.

19) Kyrgyz.

20) Uzbek.

21) Karakalpak.

22) Uighur (New Uighur).

23) Chuvash, a descendant of the language of the Kama Bulgars, writing from the very beginning based on the Russian alphabet.

24) Orkhon - according to the Orkhon-Yenisei runic inscriptions, the language (or languages) of a powerful state of the 7th-8th centuries. n. e. in Northern Mongolia on the river. Orkhon. The name is conditional.

25) Pecheneg - the language of the steppe nomads of the 9th-11th centuries. n. e.

26) Polovtsian (Cuman) - according to the Polovtsian-Latin dictionary compiled by Italians, the language of the steppe nomads of the 11th-14th centuries.

27) Old Uighur - the language of a huge state in Central Asia IX-XI centuries n. e. with writing based on a modified Aramaic alphabet.

28) Chagatai - literary language of the XV-XVI centuries. n. e. in Central Asia; Arabic graphics.

29) Bulgarian - the language of the Bulgarian kingdom at the mouth of the Kama; the Bulgar language formed the basis of the Chuvash language, part of the Bulgars switched to Balkan Peninsula and, having mixed with the Slavs, it entered the Bulgarian language as an integral element (superstratum).

30) Khazar - language big state 7th–10th centuries n. e., in the lower reaches of the Volga and Don, close to the Bulgar.

Note 1. All living Turkic languages ​​except Turkish have been written since 1938–1939. on the basis of the Russian alphabet, until then for several years - on the basis of Latin, and many even earlier - on the basis of Arabic (Azerbaijani, Crimean Tatar, Tatar and all Central Asian, and foreign Uighurs still). In sovereign Azerbaijan, the question of switching to the Latin alphabet has been raised again.

Note 2. The question of the grouping of the Turko-Tatar languages ​​has not yet been finally resolved by science; according to F. E. Korsh, three groups: Northern, South-Eastern and South-Western; according to V. A. Bogoroditsky, eight groups: North-Eastern, Abakan, Altai, West Siberian, Volga-Ural, Central Asian, South-Western (Turkish) and Chuvash; according to V. Schmidt, three groups: Southern, Western, Eastern, while V. Schmidt classifies the Yakut as Mongolian. Other classifications were also proposed - V. V. Radlov, A. N. Samoylovich, G. J. Ramstedt, S. E. Malov, M. Ryasyanen and others.

In 1952, N. A. Baskakov proposed a new classification scheme for the Turkic languages, which the author thinks of as “periodization of the history of the development of peoples and Turkic languages” (see: Izvestiya AN SSSR. Branch of literature and language, vol. XI, no. 2), where ancient divisions intersect with new ones and historical with geographical ones (see also: Baskakov N.A. Introduction to the study of Turkic languages. M., 1962; 2nd ed. - M., 1969).

2. MONGOLIAN LANGUAGES

1) Mongolian; writing was based on the Mongolian alphabet, received from the ancient Uighurs; since 1945 based on the Russian alphabet.

2) Buryat; from the 30s 20th century writing based on the Russian alphabet.

3) Kalmyk.

Note. There are also a number of smaller languages ​​(Dagur, Tungxiang, Mongolian, etc.), mainly in China (about 1.5 million), Manchuria and Afghanistan; No. 2 and 3 have since the 30s. 20th century writing on the basis of the Russian alphabet, and until then, for several years - on the basis of the Latin alphabet.

3. TUNGUS-MANCHUR LANGUAGES

A. Siberian group

1) Evenki (Tungus), with Negidal and Solon.

2) Even (Lamut).

B. Manchurian group

1) Manchu, dying out, had rich monuments of medieval writing in the Manchu alphabet.

2) Jurchen - a dead language, known from the monuments of the XII-XVI centuries. (hieroglyphic writing modeled on Chinese)

B. Amur group

1) Nanai (Gold), with Ulchi.

2) Udei (Udege), with Oroch.

Note. No. 1 and 2 have since 1938–1939. writing on the basis of the Russian alphabet, and until then, for several years - on the basis of the Latin alphabet.

4. INDIVIDUAL LANGUAGES OF THE FAR EAST NOT INCLUDED IN ANY GROUPS

(presumably close to Altai)

1) Japanese; writing based on Chinese characters in the 8th century. n. e.; new phonetic-syllabic writing - katakana and hiragana.

2) Ryukyu, obviously related to Japanese.

3) Korean; the first monuments based on Chinese characters from the 4th century BC. n. e., modified in the 7th century. n. e.; from the 15th century - folk Korean letter "onmun" - an alphabetic-syllabic system of graphics.

4) Ainu, mainly on the Japanese Islands, also on O. Sakhalin; now out of use and superseded by Japanese.

VI. AFRASIAN (SEMITE-HAMITE) LANGUAGES

1. Semitic branch

1) Arabic; international cult language of Islam; there are, in addition to classical Arabic, regional varieties (Sudanese, Egyptian, Syrian, etc.); writing in the Arabic alphabet (on the island of Malta - based on the Latin alphabet).

2) Amharic, official language Ethiopia.

3) Tigre, Tigray, Gurage, Harari and other languages ​​of Ethiopia.

4) Assyrian (Aysor), the language of isolated ethnic groups in the countries of the Middle East and some others.

5) Akkadian (Assyro-Babylonian); known from the cuneiform monuments of the ancient East.

6) Ugaritic.

7) Hebrew - the language of the oldest parts of the Bible, the cult language of the Jewish Church; existed as a colloquial language until the beginning of AD. e.; from the 19th century on its basis, Hebrew was formed, now the official language of the state of Israel (along with Arabic); writing based on the Hebrew alphabet.

8) Aramaic - the language of the later books of the Bible and the common language of the Near East in the era of the III century. BC e. - IV century. n. e.

9) Phoenician - the language of Phoenicia, Carthage (Punic); dead b.c. e.; writing in the Phoenician alphabet, from which subsequent types of alphabetic writing originated.

10) G e z - the former literary language of Abyssinia IV-XV centuries. n. e.; now a cult language in Ethiopia.

2. Egyptian branch

1) Ancient Egyptian - language ancient egypt, known from hieroglyphic monuments and documents of demotic writing (from the end of the 4th millennium BC to the 5th century AD).

2) Coptic - a descendant of the ancient Egyptian language in the medieval period from the 3rd to the 17th centuries. n. e.; cult language Orthodox Church in Egypt; writing is Coptic, the alphabet is based on the Greek alphabet.

3. Berber-Libyan branch

(North Africa and West Central Africa)

1) Ghadames, Siua.

2) Tuareg (tamahak, ghat, taneslemt, etc.).

4) Kabyle.

5) Tashelhit.

6) Zenetian (reef, shauya, etc.).

7) Tamazight.

8) West - Numidian.

9) Eastern Numidian (Libyan).

10) Guanches, which existed until the 18th century. languages ​​(dialects?) of the natives of the Canary Islands.

4. Kushite branch

(North East and East Africa)

1) Bedauye (beja).

2) Agavian (aungi, bilin, etc.).

3) Somalia.

4) Sidamo.

5) Afarsakho.

6) Opomo (galla).

7) Irakv, ngomvia, etc.

5. Chadian branch

(Central Africa and West-Central Sub-Saharan Africa)

1) Hausa (belongs to the Western Chadian group) is the largest language of the branch.

2) Other Western Chadians: Gvandara, Ngizim, Boleva, Karekare, Angas, Sura, etc.

3) Central Chadian: tera, margi, mandara, kotoko, etc.

4) East Chad: m u b i, sokoro, etc.

VII. NIGERO-CONGO LANGUAGES

(territory of sub-Saharan Africa)

1. Mande languages

1) Bamana (bambara).

2) Soninka.

3) Soso (susu).

4) Maninka.

5) Kpelle, scrap, mende, etc.

2. Atlantic languages

1) Fula (fulfulde).

5) Cognacs.

6) Gola, dark, bull, etc.

3. Ijoid languages

Represented by the isolated language Ijo (Nigeria).

4. Kru languages

6) Wobe et al.

5. Kwa languages

4) Adangme.

6) Background, etc.

6. Language dogon

7. Gur languages

1) Bariba.

2) Senari.

3) Suppire.

4) Gourenne.

6) Kasem, k a b e, kirma, etc.

8. Adamawa–Ubangyan languages

1) Longuda.

7) Ngbaka.

8) Sere, Mundu, Zande, etc.

9. Benuecongo languages

The largest family in the Niger-Congo macrofamily, covers the territory from Nigeria to east coast Africa, including South Africa. It is divided into 4 branches and many groups, among which the largest is the Bantu languages, which in turn are divided into 16 zones (according to M. Gasri).

2) Yoruba.

5) Jukun.

6) Efik, ibibio.

7) Kambari, birom.

9) Bamileks.

10) Kom, lamnso, tikar.

11) Bantu (Duala, Ewondo, Teke, Bobangi, Lingala, Kikuyu, Nyamwezi, Gogo, Swahili, Congo, Luganda, Kinyarwanda, Chokwe, Luba, Nyakyusa, Nyanja, Yao, Mbundu, Herero, Shona, Sotho, Zulu, etc. ).

10. Kordofanian languages

1) Kanga, Miri, Tumtum.

6) Tegali, tagoy, etc.

VIII. Nilo-Saharan languages

(Central Africa, geographic Sudan zone)

1) Songhai.

2) Saharan: kanuri, tuba, zagawa.

4) Mimi, mabang.

5) Eastern Sudanese: wilds, mahas, bale, suri, nera, ronge, tama, etc.

6) Nilotic: Shilluk, Luo, Alur, Acholi, Nuer, Bari, Teso, Naidi, Pakot, etc.

7) Central Sudanese: kresh, sinyar, capa, bagirmi, moru, madi, logbara, mangbetu.

8) Kunama.

10) Kuama, komo, etc.

IX. Khoisan languages

(on the territory of South Africa, Namibia, Angola)

1) Bushman languages ​​(Kungauni, Hadza, etc.).

2) Hottentot languages ​​(Nama, Koran, Sandawe, etc.).

X. Sino-Tibetan languages

A. Chinese branch

1) Chinese - the first in number speaking the language in the world. Folk Chinese is divided into a number of dialect groups that differ greatly primarily phonetically; Chinese dialects are usually defined geographically. Literary language based on the northern (Mandarin) dialect, which is also the dialect of the capital of China - Beijing. For thousands of years, the literary language of China was Wenyan, which was formed in the middle of the 1st millennium BC. e. and existed as a developing but incomprehensible bookish language until the 20th century, along with the more colloquial literary language Baihua. The latter became the basis of the modern unified literary Chinese language - Putonghua (based on Northern Baihua). The Chinese language is rich in written records from the 15th century. BC e., but their hieroglyphic nature makes it difficult to study the history of the Chinese language. Since 1913, along with hieroglyphic writing, a special syllabo-phonetic writing “zhuan zimu” was used on a national graphic basis for pronunciation identification of reading hieroglyphs by dialects. Later, more than 100 different projects for the reform of Chinese writing were developed, of which the project of phonetic writing on the Latin graphic basis has the greatest promise.

2) Dungan; the Dungans of the People's Republic of China have an Arabic script, the Dungans of Central Asia and Kazakhstan are originally Chinese (hieroglyphic), later - Arabic; since 1927 - on a Latin basis, and since 1950 - on a Russian basis.

B. Tibeto-Burmese branch

1) Tibetan.

2) Burmese.

XI. THAI LANGUAGES

1) Thai - the state language of Thailand (until 1939 the Siamese language of the state of Siam).

2) Lao.

3) Zhuang.

4) Kadai (li, lakua, lati, gelao) - a group of Thai or an independent link between Thai and Austro-Nesian.

Note. Some scholars consider the Thai languages ​​to be related to Austronesian; in former classifications they were included in the Sino-Tibetan family.

XII. LANGUAGES

1) Miao, with dialects of Hmong, Hmu, etc.

2) Yao, with the dialects of Mien, Kimmun, etc.

Note. These little-studied languages ​​of the Central and South China before, without sufficient grounds, they were included in the Sino-Tibetan family.

XIII. DRAVID LANGUAGES

(languages ​​of the most ancient population of the Indian subcontinent, presumably related to the Uralic languages)

1) Tamil.

2) Telugu.

3) Malayalam.

4) Kannada.

For all four, there is a script based on (or type of) the Indian Brahmi script.

7) Brahui and others.

XIV. OUTSIDE THE FAMILY - THE LANGUAGE OF BURUSHASKI (VERSHIKSKY)

(mountainous regions of Northwest India)

XV. AUSTRIASIAN LANGUAGES

1) Munda languages: Santali, Mundari, Ho, Birhor, Juang, Sora, etc.

2) Khmer.

3) Palaung (rumai), etc.

4) Nicobar.

5) Vietnamese.

7) Malacca group (semang, semai, sakai, etc.).

8) Nagali.

XVI. AUSTRONESIAN (MALAY-POLYNESIAN) LANGUAGES

A. Indonesian branch

1. Western group

1) Indonesian, got the name from the 30s. XX century., Currently the official language of Indonesia.

2) Batak.

3) Chamsky (Chamsky, Jarai, etc.).

2. Javanese group

1) Javanese.

2) Sundanese.

3) Madura.

4) Balinese.

3. Dayak or Kalimantan group

Dayaksky and others.

4. South Sulawesian group

1) Saddan.

2) Boogie.

3) Makasarsky and others.

5. Philippine group

1) Tagalog (Tagalog).

2) Ilocan.

3) Bikolsky and others.

6. Madagascar group

Malagasy (formerly Malagasy).

Kawi is an ancient Javanese literary language; monuments from the ninth century. n. e.; by origin, the Javanese language of the Indonesian branch was formed under the influence of the languages ​​​​of India (Sanskrit).

B. Polynesian branch

1) Tonga and Niue.

2) Maori, Hawaiian, Tahiti, etc.

3) Samoa, uvea, etc.

B. Micronesian branch

2) Marshall.

3) Ponape.

4) Truk and others.

Note. The classification of the Austronesian macrofamily is given in an extremely simplified form. In fact, it covers a huge number of languages ​​with an extremely complex multi-stage subdivision, regarding which there is no consensus. (V. V.)

XVII. AUSTRALIAN LANGUAGES

Numerous small indigenous languages ​​of Central and Northern Australia, most famously Arantha. Apparently, a separate family is formed by the Tasmanian languages ​​on about. Tasmania.

XVIII. PAPUAN LANGUAGES

Languages ​​of the central part of about. New Guinea and some of the smaller islands in pacific ocean. A very complex and not definitively established classification.

XIX. PALEOASIATIAN LANGUAGES

A. Chukchi–Kamchatka languages

1) Chukchi (Luoravetlan).

2) Koryak (Nymylan).

3) Itelmen (Kamchadal).

4) Alyutorsky.

5) Kereksky.

B. Eskimo-Aleut languages

1) Eskimo (Yuit).

2) Aleutian (Unangan).

B. Yenisei languages

1) Ket. This language reveals features of kinship with the Nakh-Dagestan and Tibetan-Chinese languages. Its bearers were not natives of the Yenisei, but came from the south and assimilated by the surrounding people.

2) Kottic, Aryan, Pumpokol and other extinct languages.

D. Nivkh (Gilyak) language

E. Yukagiro–Chuvan languages

Extinct languages ​​(dialects?): Yukagir (formerly Odul), Chuvan, Omok. Two dialects have been preserved: Tundra and Kolyma (Sakha-Yakutia, Magadan region).

XX. INDIAN (AMERINDIAN) LANGUAGES

A. Language families of North America

1)Algonquian(Menbmini, Delaware, Yurok, Mikmaq, Fox, Cree, Ojibwa, Potowatomy, Illinois, Cheyenne, Blackfoot, Arapah O, etc., as well as the disappeared Massachusetts, Mohican, etc.).

2)Iroquois(Cherokee, Tuscarora, Seneca, Oneida, Huron, etc.).

3)Sioux(Crow, Hidatsa, Dakota, etc., along with several extinct ones - ofo, biloxi, tutelo, katavoa).

4)gulf(natchez, tunic, chickasaw, choctaw, muskogee, etc.).

5)On-dene(haida, tlingit, eya k; Athabaskan: Navajo, tanana, tolova, chupa, mattole, etc.).

6)Mosan, including Wakasha(kwakiutl, nootka) and Salish(chehalis, skomish, calispel, bellacula).

7)Penutian(Tsimshian, Chinook, Takelma, Klamath, Miwook, Zuni, etc., as well as many extinct ones).

8)hocaltec(karok, shasta, yana, chimariko, pomo, salina, etc.).

B. Language families of Central America

1)Uto-Aztec(Nahuatl, Shoshone, Hopi, Luiseño, Papago, Bark, etc.). This family is sometimes combined with languages kiowa - tano(kiowa, pyro, teva, etc.) within the framework of the tano-aztec phylum.

2)Maya Quiche(Mam, Kekchi, Quiche, Yucatec Maya, Ixil, Tzeltal, Tojolabal, Chol, Huastec, etc.). The Maya, before the arrival of Europeans, reached a high level of culture and had their own hieroglyphic writing, partially deciphered.

3)Ottoman(Pame, Otomi, Popolok, Mixtec, Trick, Zapotec, etc.).

4)Miskito - Matagalpa(Miskito, Sumo, Matagalpa, etc.). These languages ​​are sometimes included in Chibchan–s k and e.

5)Chibchanskiye(karake, rama, getar, guaymi, chiocha, etc.). The Chibchan languages ​​are also spoken in South America.

B. Language families of South America

1)Tupi Guarani(tupi, guarani, yuruna, tupari, etc.).

2)Kechumara(Quechua - language ancient state the Incas in Peru, now in Peru, Bolivia, Ecuador; Aymara).

3)Arawak(chamicuro, chipaya, itene, uanyam, guana, etc.).

4)Araucanian(Mapuche, Picunche, Pehuiche, etc.).

5)pano takana(chacobo, kashibo, pano, takana, chama, etc.).

6)Same(Canela, Suya, Xavante, Kaingang, Botokudsky, etc.).

7)Caribbean(wayana, pemon, chaima, yaruma, etc.).

8) Alakaluf language and other isolated languages.

APPLICATION

NUMBER OF PEOPLES OF THE WORLD BY LANGUAGE FAMILIES AND GROUPS

(in thousand people, 1985)

I. Indo-European family 2,171,705

Indian group 761 075

Iranian group 80 415

Slavic group 290 475

Baltic group 4 850

German group 425 460

Roman group 576 230

Celtic group 9 505

Greek group 12,285

Albanian group 5,020

Armenian group 6 390

II. Caucasian languages ​​7 455

Abkhaz-Adyghe group 875

Nakh-Dagestan group 2,630

Kartvelian group 3 950

III. Basques 1090

IV. Uralic languages ​​24,070

1. Finno-Ugric family 24,035

Ugric group 13,638

Finnish group 10 397

2. Samoyed family 35

V. Altaic languages 297 550

1. Turkic family 109,965

2. Mongolian family 6,465

3. Tungus-Manchurian family 4,700

4. Separate peoples of the Far East, not included in any groups

Japanese 121510

Koreans 64890

VI. Afroasian (Semitic-Hamitic) family 261,835

Semitic branch 193 225

Kushite branch 29,310

Berber-Libyan branch 10,560

Chadian branch 28,740

VII. Niger-Congo family 305,680

Mande 13 680

Atlantic 26780

Kru and qua 67430

Adamada–Ubanguy 7320

Benuecongolese 174,580

Kordofanskiye 570

VIII. Nilo-Saharan family 31,340

Saharan 5 110

Eastern Sudanese and Nilotic 19,000

Songhai 2 290

Central Sudanese 3,910

Other 1,030

IX. Khoisan family 345

X. Sino-Tibetan family 1,086,530

Chinese branch 1,024,170

Tibeto-Burmese branch 62,360

XI. Thai family 66510

XII. Miao-yao 8 410

XIII. Dravidian family 188,295

XIV. Burishi (burushaski) 50

XV. Austroasiatic family 74,295

XVI. Austronesian (Malayo-Polynesian family) 237 105

XVII. Aboriginal Australians 160

XVIII. Papuan peoples 4,610

XIX. Paleoasian peoples 140

Chukchi–Kamchatka group 23

Eskimo-Aleut group 112

Yukagirs 1

XX. Indian peoples 36,400

The typological classification of languages ​​arose later than attempts at genealogical classification and proceeded from other premises.

The question of the "type of language" arose for the first time among the Romantics.

Romanticism was the ideological trend that at the turn of the 18th and 19th centuries. had to formulate the ideological achievements of the bourgeois nations; for the romantics, the main issue was the definition of national identity.

Romanticism is not only a literary trend, but also a worldview that was characteristic of the representatives of the "new" culture and which replaced the feudal worldview.

Romanticism as a cultural and ideological trend was very controversial. Along with the fact that it was romanticism that put forward the idea of ​​nationality and the idea of ​​historicism, the same trend, in the person of its other representatives, called for a return back, to the outdated Middle Ages and to admiring the “old times”.

It was the Romantics who first raised the question of the "type of language." Their thought was this: "the spirit of the people" can manifest itself in myths, in art, in literature and in language. Hence the natural conclusion that through the language you can know the "spirit of the people."

Thus, a remarkable book of its kind by the leader of the German romantics, Friedrich Schlegel (1772–1829), On the Language and Wisdom of the Indians (1809), appeared.

Based on the comparison of languages ​​done by W. Jonze, Friedrich Schlegel compared Sanskrit with Greek, Latin, and Turkic languages ​​and came to the conclusion: 1) that all languages ​​can be divided into two types: inflectional and affixing, 2) that any language is born and remains in the same type and 3) that inflectional languages ​​are characterized by "richness, strength and durability", while affixing ones "lack living development from the very beginning", they are characterized by "poverty, scarcity and artificiality".

The division of languages ​​into inflectional and affixing F. Schlegel did, based on the presence or absence of a change in the root. He wrote: “In the Indian or Greek languages, each root is what its name says, and is like a living sprout; by the fact that the concepts of relations are expressed by means of an inner change, a free field is given for development ... All that is thus obtained from a simple root retains the impress of kinship, is mutually connected and therefore is preserved. Hence, on the one hand, wealth, and on the other hand, the strength and durability of these languages.

“... In languages ​​that have affixation instead of inflection, the roots are not at all like that; they can be compared not with a fertile seed, but only with a pile of atoms ... their connection is often mechanical - by external attachment. From their very origin, these languages ​​lack the germ of a living development... and these languages, whether wild or cultivated, are always heavy, confused, and often especially distinguished by their wayward-arbitrary, subjectively-strange and vicious character.

F. Schlegel hardly recognized the presence of affixes in inflectional languages, and interpreted the formation of grammatical forms in these languages ​​as internal inflection, wishing to bring this “ideal type of languages” under the formula of the Romantics: “unity in diversity”.

Already for F. Schlegel's contemporaries it became clear that all languages ​​of the world cannot be divided into two types. Where should one attribute, for example, the Chinese language, where there is neither internal inflection nor regular affixation?

F. Schlegel's brother, August-Wilhelm Schlegel (1767–1845), taking into account the objections of F. Bopp and other linguists, reworked the typological classification of his brother's languages ​​(“Notes on the Provençal Language and Literature”, 1818) and identified three types: 1 ) inflectional, 2) affixing, 3) amorphous (which is typical of the Chinese language), and in inflectional languages, he showed two possibilities of grammatical structure: synthetic and analytical.

What were the Schlegel brothers right and wrong about? They were certainly right in that the type of language should be derived from its grammatical structure, and by no means from vocabulary. Within the limits of the languages ​​available to them, the Schlegel brothers correctly noted the difference between inflectional, agglutinating and isolating languages. However, the explanation of the structure of these languages ​​and their assessment cannot be accepted in any way. First, in inflectional languages, not all grammar is reduced to internal inflection; in many inflectional languages, grammar is based on affixation, and internal inflection plays a minor role; secondly, languages ​​such as Chinese cannot be called amorphous, since there can be no language outside the form, but the form in the language manifests itself in different ways (see Chapter IV, § 43); thirdly, the assessment of languages ​​by the Schlegel brothers leads to incorrect discrimination of some languages ​​at the expense of exaltation of others; Romantics were not racists, but some of their arguments about languages ​​and peoples were later used by racists.

Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767–1835) went much deeper into the question of the types of languages. Humboldt was a romantic idealist, in philology he was the same as his contemporary Hegel was in philosophy. Not all of Humboldt's propositions can be accepted, but his penetrating mind and exceptional erudition in languages ​​make us most carefully evaluate this greatest linguist philosopher of the 19th century.

The main premises of W. Humboldt about language can be reduced to the following provisions:

“A person is a person only thanks to language”; “there are no thoughts without language, human thinking becomes possible only thanks to language”; language is “a connecting link between one individual and another, between an individual and a nation, between the present and the past”; “Languages ​​cannot be considered as aggregates of words, each of them is a certain kind of system through which sound is connected with thought”, and “each of its individual elements exists only thanks to the other, and everything as a whole owes its existence to a single all-pervading force.” Special attention Humboldt paid attention to the question of form in language: form is “constant and uniform in the activity of the spirit, transforming organic sound into an expression of thought”, “...absolutely in language there cannot be formless matter”, form is “synthesis in the spiritual unity of individual linguistic elements, in contrast to it, are considered as material content. Humboldt distinguishes between the external form in the language (these are sound, grammatical and etymological forms) and the internal form, as a single all-pervading force, that is, the expression of the "spirit of the people."

As the main criterion for determining the type of language, Humboldt takes the thesis of "the mutual correct and energetic penetration of the sound and ideological form into each other."

Humboldt saw particular criteria for defining languages: 1) in an expression in the language of relations (transfer of relational meanings; this was also the main criterion for the Schlegels); 2) in the ways of forming sentences (which showed special type incorporating languages) and 3) in sound form.

In inflecting languages, Humboldt saw not only “internal changes” of the “wonderful root”, but also “addition from the outside” (Anleitung), i.e., affixation, which is carried out differently than in agglutinating languages ​​(a century later, this difference was formulated by E. Sapir, see above, Chapter IV, § 46). Humboldt explained that the Chinese language is not amorphous, but isolating, that is, the grammatical form in it manifests itself differently than in inflectional and agglutinating languages: not by changing words, but by word order and intonation, thus this type is a typically analytical language.

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 incorporating.

The peculiarity of this type of languages ​​(Indian in America, Paleo-Asiatic in Asia) is that the sentence is built as a compound word, i.e. unformed word roots are agglutinated into one common whole, which will be both a word and a sentence. Parts of this whole are both the elements of the word and the members of the sentence. The whole is a word-sentence, where the beginning is the subject, the end is the predicate, and additions with their definitions and circumstances are incorporated (inserted) into the middle. Humboldt explained this with a Mexican example: ninakakwa, Where ni-"I", naka-"ed-" (i.e. "eat"), a kwa- object "meat-". In Russian, three grammatically designed words are obtained I eat meat and vice versa, such a fully-formed combination as ant-eater, does not make an offer. In order to show how it is possible to “incorporate” in this type of languages, we will give one more example from the Chukchi language: you-ata-kaa-nmy-rkyn -“I kill fat deer”, literally: “I am fat-deer-killing-do”, where is the skeleton of the “body”: you-nwe-rkyn, in which is incorporated kaa -"deer" and its definition ata -"fat"; The Chukchi language does not tolerate any other arrangement, and the whole is a word-sentence, where the above order of elements is also observed.

Attention to this type of language was later lost. So, the largest linguist of the middle of the XIX century. August Schleicher returned to the typological classification of the Schlegels, only with a new justification.

Schleicher was a student of Hegel and believed that everything that happens in life goes through three stages - thesis, antithesis and synthesis. Therefore, it is possible to outline three types of languages ​​in three periods. This dogmatic and formal interpretation of Hegel was combined with Schleicher's ideas of naturalism, which he learned from Darwin, and believed that language, like any organism, is born, grows and dies. Schleicher's typological classification does not provide for incorporating languages, but indicates three types in two possibilities: synthetic and analytical.

The Schleicher classification can be represented as follows:

1. Isolating languages

1) R- pure root (for example, Chinese).

2) R + r- root plus function word (for example, Burmese).

2. Agglutinating languages

Synthetic type:

1) Ra- suffixed type (for example, Turkic and Finnish

2) aR- prefigured type (e.g. Bantu languages).

3) R– Infected type (for example, Batsbi language).

Analytical type:

4) Ra (aR) + r - an affiliated root plus a function word (for example, Tibetan).

3. Inflectional languages

Synthetic type:

1) Ra- pure internal inflection (e.g. Semitic languages).

2) aR a (R a a) - internal and external inflection (for example, Indo-European, especially ancient languages).

Analytical type:

3) aR a (R a a) + r- inflected and affixed root plus function word (for example, Romance languages, English).

Schleicher considered isolating or amorphous languages ​​to be archaic, agglutinating languages ​​to be transitional, ancient inflectional languages ​​to be the era of prosperity, and inflectional new (analytical) languages ​​to be attributed to the era of decline.

Despite the captivating logic and clarity, Schleicher's scheme of typology of languages ​​as a whole is a step backwards compared to Humboldt. The main drawback of this scheme is its “closedness”, which makes it necessary to artificially fit the variety of languages ​​into this Procrustean bed. However, due to its simplicity, this scheme has survived to this day and was once used by N. Ya. Marr.

Simultaneously with Schleicher, H. Steinthal (1821–1899) proposed his own classification of types of languages. He proceeded from the main provisions of W. Humboldt, but rethought his ideas in psychological terms. Steinthal divided all languages ​​into languages ​​with a form and languages ​​without a form, and by the form one should understand both the form of the word and the form of the sentence. Steinthal called languages ​​with no inflection as joining languages: without a form - the languages ​​of Indochina, with a form - Chinese. Steinthal defined languages ​​with the presence of inflection as modifying, without form: 1) through repetition and prefixes - Polynesian, 2) through suffixes - Turkic, Mongolian, Finno-Ugric, 3) through incorporation - Indian; and modifying, with the form: 1) through the addition of elements - the Egyptian language, 2) through internal inflection - the Semitic languages ​​​​and 3) through the "true suffixes" - the Indo-European languages.

This classification, like some subsequent ones, details the underlying Humboldt classification, but the understanding of "form" clearly contradicts the original provisions in it.

In the 90s. 19th century Steinthal's classification was revised by F. Misteli (1893), who pursued the same idea of ​​dividing languages ​​into formal and formless, but introduced a new feature of the language: wordless (Egyptian and Bantu languages), imaginary (Turkic, Mongolian, Finno-Ugric languages) and historical ( Semitic and Indo-European). Incorporating languages ​​are singled out in a special category of formless languages, since in them the word and the sentence are not distinguished. The advantage of F. Misteli's classification is the distinction between root-isolating languages ​​(Chinese) and base-isolating languages ​​(Malay).

F. N. F and n k (1909) based his classification on the principle of constructing a sentence (“massiveness” - as in incorporating languages ​​or “fragmentation” - as in Semitic or Indo-European languages) and the nature of the links between the members of the sentence, in particular the question about agreement. On this basis, an agglutinating language with consistent class agreement (Subia from the Bantu family) and an agglutinating language with partial agreement (Turkish) are distributed by Fink into different classes. As a result, Fink shows eight types: 1) Chinese, 2) Greenlandic, 3) Subiya, 4) Turkish, 5) Samoan (and other Polynesian languages),

6) Arabic (and other Semitic languages), 7) Greek (and other Indo-European languages), and 8) Georgian.

Despite many subtle observations on languages, all three of these classifications are built on arbitrary logical foundations and do not provide reliable criteria for resolving the typology of languages.

Of particular note is the morphological classification of languages ​​by F. F. Fortunatov (1892) - very logical, but insufficient in coverage of languages. F. F. Fortunatov takes as a starting point the structure of the word form and the correlation of its morphological parts. On this basis, he distinguishes four types of languages: 1) “In the vast majority of the family of languages ​​that have the forms of individual words, these forms are formed through such a selection in the words of the stem and affix, in which the stem or does not represent the so-called inflection at all [here available in kind of internal flexion. - A. R.], or if such an inflection can appear in the stems, then it does not constitute necessary accessory forms of words and serves to form forms separate from those formed by affixes. Such languages ​​in the morphological classification are called ... agglutinating or agglutinative languages ​​... i.e. actually gluing ... because here the stem and affix of words remain, according to their meaning, separate parts of words in word forms, as if glued.

2) “Semitic languages ​​belong to another class in the morphological classification of languages; in these languages ​​... the stems of words themselves have the necessary ... forms formed by the inflection of stems ... although the relation between stem and affix in Semitic languages ​​is the same as in agglutinative languages ​​... I call Semitic languages ​​inflectional-agglutinative ... because the relation between stem and affix in these languages ​​is the same as in agglutinating languages.

3) “Indo-European languages ​​belong to ... the third class in the morphological classification of languages; here ... there is an inflection of the stems in the formation of those very forms of words that are formed by affixes, as a result of which the parts of words in the forms of words, i.e., the stem and the affix, represent here by meaning such a connection between themselves in the forms of words that they do not have in any agglutinative languages, nor in inflectional-agglutinative languages. It is for these languages ​​that I keep the name inflectional languages ​​... "

4) “Finally, there are languages ​​in which there are no forms of individual words. These languages ​​include Chinese, Siamese and some others. These languages ​​in the morphological classification are called root languages ​​... in root languages, the so-called root is not part of the word, but the word itself, which can be not only simple, but also difficult (complex) ".

There are no incorporating languages ​​in this classification, there are no Georgian, Greenlandic, Malayo-Polynesian languages, which, of course, deprives the classification of completeness, but the difference in the formation of words in Semitic and Indo-European languages ​​is very subtly shown, which until recently was not distinguished by linguists.

Although, when characterizing the Semitic languages, Fortunatov does not mention internal inflection, but speaks of “forms formed by the inflection of the stems,” but this is also repeated when characterizing the Indo-European languages, where “there is an inflection of the stems in the formation of those very forms of words that are formed by affixes”; something else is important here - the ratio of this “inflection of the bases” (however one understands it) and the usual affixation (i.e., prefixation and postfixation), which Fortunatov defines as agglutinating and opposes a different connection of affixes and stems in Indo-European languages; therefore, Fortunatov distinguishes between Semitic languages ​​- "inflectional-agglutinative" and Indo-European - "inflectional".

The new typological classification belongs to the American linguist E. Sapir (1921). Considering that all previous classifications are “a neat construction of a speculative mind”, E. Sapir made an attempt to give a “conceptual” classification of languages, based on the idea that “every language is a formalized language”, but that “a classification of languages, built on the distinction of relations, purely technical” and that it is impossible to characterize languages ​​from only one point of view.

Therefore, E. Sapir bases his classification on the expression different type concepts in the language: 1) root, 2) derivational, 3) mixed-relational and 4) purely relational; the last two points should be understood in such a way that the meanings of relations can be expressed in the words themselves (by changing them) together with lexical meanings - these are mixed relational meanings; or separately from words, for example, word order, function words and intonation - these are purely relational concepts.

The second aspect of E. Sapir is the very “technical” side of the expression of relations, where all grammatical ways are grouped into four possibilities: A) isolation (i.e. ways of function words, word order and intonation), b) agglutination, With) fusion (the author deliberately separates the two types of affixation, since their grammatical tendencies are very different) and d) symbolization, where internal inflection, repetition and mode of stress are combined.

The third aspect is the degree of "synthesis" in grammar in three stages: analytic, synthetic and polysynthetic, i.e. from the absence of synthesis through normal synthesis to polysyntheticism as "over-synthesis".

From all that has been said, E. Sapir obtains a classification of languages ​​given in the table on p. E. Sapir managed to very successfully characterize the 21 languages ​​listed in his table, but from his entire classification it is not clear what a “language type” is. Most interesting are the critical remarks concerning the former classifications - there are many interesting thoughts and sound ideas. However, after the works of F.F. Fortunatov, it is completely incomprehensible how E. Sapir could characterize Arabic"symbolico-fusion", when in languages ​​such as Semitic, the affixation is agglutinative, not fusional; in addition, he characterized the Turkic languages ​​​​(using Turkish as an example) as synthetic, however, the Soviet scientist E. D. Polivanov explained the analytical nature of agglutinating languages. In addition, and this is the main thing, Sapir's classification remains absolutely ahistorical and ahistorical. In the preface to the Russian edition of Sapir's book "Language", A. M. Sukhotin wrote:

“The trouble with Sapir is that for him his classification is only a classification. It gives one thing - “a method that allows us to consider each language from two or three independent points of view in its relation to another language. That's all…". Sapir, in connection with his classification, not only does not pose any genetic problems, but, on the contrary, decisively eliminates them ... ”(p. XVII).

In one of his recent works, Tadeusz Milewski also does not connect the typological characteristics of languages ​​​​with the historical aspect and, based on the correct position that "typological linguistics grows directly from descriptive linguistics", and sharply contrasting typological linguistics with comparative-historical, offers such a "cross" classification of types languages, based on syntactic data: “... in the languages ​​of the world there are four main types of syntactic relations: ... 1) subject to intransitive predicate [i.e. e. not possessing the property of transitivity. - A. R.], 2) the subject of the action to the transitive predicate [i.e. e. having the property of transitivity. -A. R.], 3) an object of action to a transitive predicate, 4) definitions to a defined member ... Typology of phrase structures [i.e. e. syntagm. - A. R.] and sentences can thus be of two kinds: one relies only on the form of syntactic indicators, the other on the scope of their functions. From the first point of view, we can distinguish three main types of languages: positional, inflectional and concentric. In positional languages, syntactic relations are expressed by a constant word order ... In inflectional languages, the functions of the subject, subject, object of action and definition are indicated by the very form of these words ... Finally, in concentric languages ​​(incorporating) the transitive predicate, using the form or order of the pronominal morphemes included in it, indicates on the subject of the action and the object…” This is one aspect.

The second aspect analyzes the differences in the volume of syntactic means, and the author notes that "in the languages ​​of the world there are six different types of combination of the four main syntactic functions." Since there is no typology proper in this analysis, and there are only indications of which combinations of these features are found in which languages, then all this reasoning can be omitted.

Elsewhere in this article, T. Milevsky divides the languages ​​​​of the world according to another principle into four groups: "isolating, agglutinative, inflectional and alternating". New, in comparison with Schleicher, here is the allocation of alternating languages, which include Semitic languages; T. Milevsky characterizes them as follows: “Here comes the combination of all functions, both semantic and syntactic, within the word, which, due to this, forms a morphologically indecomposable whole, most often consisting of only one root.” This assertion, in the light of what has been said above (see Ch. IV, § 45), is false; it is necessary to single out the type of Semitic languages, but by no means in the way that T. Milevsky suggests (see the definitions of F. F. Fortunatov above).

The question of the typological classification of languages, therefore, is not resolved, although for 150 years there has been much and interestingly written on this topic.

One thing remains clear, that the type of language must be determined primarily on the basis of its grammatical structure, the most stable, and thus typifying, property of the language.

It is necessary to include in this characteristic the phonetic structure of the language as well, about which Humboldt still wrote, but could not do this, since at that time there was no phonetics as a special linguistic discipline.

In a typological study, two tasks must be distinguished: 1) the creation of a general typology of the languages ​​of the world, united in certain groups, for which one descriptive method is not enough, but it is necessary to use a comparative historical one, but not at the previous level of neogrammar science, but enriched with structural methods understanding and description of linguistic facts and patterns, so that for each group of related languages ​​it would be possible to build its typological model (the model of the Turkic languages, the model of the Semitic languages, the model of the Slavic languages, etc.), rejecting everything purely individual, rare, irregular and describing the type language as a whole, as a structure according to strictly selected parameters of different tiers, and 2) a typological description of individual languages, including their individual features, distinguishing between regular and irregular phenomena, which, of course, must also be structural. This is necessary for a two-way (binary) comparison of languages, for example, for applied translation purposes of any type, including machine translation, and, first of all, for developing a methodology for teaching a particular non-native language, in connection with which such an individual typological description for each matched pair languages ​​should be different.

Linguistic encyclopedic dictionary. M.: Sov. encycl., 1990.

Questions of methods of comparative-historical study of Indo-European languages. M.: Ed. Academy of Sciences of the USSR, 1956.

Gleason G. Introduction to descriptive linguistics / Russian translation. M., 1959.

Ivanov Vyach. Sun. Genealogical classification of languages ​​and the concept of linguistic kinship. Ed. Moscow State University, 1954.

Kuznetsov PS Morphological classification of languages. Moscow State University, 1954.

Meie A. Introduction to the comparative study of Indo-European languages ​​/ Russian translation. M. - L., 1938.

Morphological typology and the problem of language classification. M. - L.: Nauka, 1965.

The peoples of the world. Historical and ethnographic reference book; Ed. Yu. V. Bromley. M.: Sov. encycl., 1988.

General linguistics. The internal structure of the language; Ed. B. A. Serebrennikova. M.: Nauka, 1972 (section: Linguistic typology).

Comparative-historical study of languages ​​of different families. Current state and problems. Moscow: Nauka, 1981.

Theoretical foundations of the classification of languages ​​of the world; Ed. V. N. Yartseva. Moscow: Nauka, 1980.

Theoretical foundations of the classification of languages ​​of the world. Kinship problems; Ed. V. N. Yartseva. Moscow: Nauka, 1982.

Notes:

See ch. VI - "Classification of languages", § 77.

Boduende Courtenay I.A. Language and languages. The article was published in the Encyclopedic Dictionary of Brockhaus and Efron (Polutom 81). See: Baudouin de Courtenay I. A. Selected Works on General Linguistics. M., 1963. T. 2 S. 67–96.

Similar statements are made by F. F. Fortunatov in the work of 1901–1902. “Comparative Linguistics” (see: Fortunatov F.F. Selected Works. M., 1956. T. 1.S. 61–62), by F. de Saussure in the work “Course of General Linguistics” (Russian translation by A. M. Sukhotina. M., 1933. S. 199-200), E. Sapir in the work "Language" (Russian translation. M., 1934. S. 163-170), etc.

For more information about language and speech, see: Smirnitsky A.I. Objectivity of language existence. Moscow State University, 1954, as well as Reformatsky A. A. Principles of synchronous description of a language // On the relationship between synchronous analysis and historical study of languages. Ed. AN SSSR, 1961. S. 22 ff. [trans. in the book: Reformatsky A. A. Linguistics and poetics. M., 1987].

See: Fortunatov F. F. On teaching Russian grammar in secondary school // Russian Philological Bulletin. 1905. No. 2. Or: Fortunatov F.F. Selected works. M.: Uchpedgiz, 1957. T. 2.

See: Baudouin de Courtenay I. A. Experience in the theory of phonetic alternations // Selected works on general linguistics. M., 1963. T. 1. S. 267 et seq.

De Saussure F. Course of General Linguistics / Russian translation. A. M. Sukhotina, 1933. S. 34.

From Greek syn-"together" and chronos-"time", i.e. "simultaneity".

The name "Romance" comes from the word Roma, as Rome was called by the Latins, and now by the Italians.

See ch. VII, § 89 - on the formation of national languages.

Cm . there.

The question of whether these groups represent one family of languages ​​has not yet been resolved by science; rather, one can think that there are no family ties between them; the term "Caucasian languages" refers to their geographical distribution.

A number of scientists are of the opinion about the possible distant relationship of the three language families - Turkic, Mongolian and Tungus-Manchu, forming the Altai macrofamily. However, in the accepted usage, the term "Altaic languages" denotes a conditional association rather than a proven genetic grouping. (V.V.).

In view of the fact that in Turkology there is no single point of view on the grouping of Turkic languages, we give them a list; at the end, different points of view on their grouping are given.

At present, the Altaic and Shor languages ​​use the same literary language based on Altaic.

Cm .: Korsh F. E. Classification of Turkish tribes by language, 1910.

See: Bogoroditsky V. A. Introduction to Tatar linguistics in connection with other Turkic languages, 1934.

Cm .: Schmidt W. Die Sprachfamilien und Sprachenkreise der Erde, 1932.

Paleoasian languages ​​- the name is conditional: Chukchi-Kamchatka represent a community of related languages; the rest of the languages ​​are included in Paleoasiatic rather on a geographical basis.

See ch. IV, § 56.

Humboldt W. On the difference between the organisms of human languages ​​and the influence of this difference on mental development humanity / Per. P. Bilyarsky, 1859. See: Zvegintsev V. A. The history of linguistics of the XIX-XX centuries in essays and extracts. 3rd ed., add. M .: Education, 1964. Part I. C. 85–104 (new ed.: Humboldt V. fon. Selected works on linguistics. M., 1984.).

Milevsky T. Premises of typological linguistics // Studies in structural typology. M., 1963. S. 4.

See ibid. C. 3.

There. S. 27.

Milevsky T. Premises of typological linguistics // Studies in structural typology. M., 1963. S. 25.

Even before there was a typological classification of languages, scientists came to the conclusion that it was necessary to group languages ​​​​depending on their origin. Such a classification is called genealogical (from the word genealogy, i.e. participation about the origin, genealogy ").

Comparing languages, people have long found similarities between them. And far from always such a similarity was characteristic of neighboring languages ​​(which is easily explained: after all, representatives of different peoples are in contact with each other!). But, let's say, Hungarians live in the center of Europe. They speak Hungarian - and this language is completely different from the other languages ​​surrounding it: Slovak, Ukrainian, Romanian, Serbian, Croatian, German! At the same time, there are many examples when the same language spreads across the territory the globe. For example, English is spoken in the USA (230 million people), Great Britain (55 million people), Canada (22 million people), Australia (15 million people), Ireland (3.5 million people). ), in New Zealand (3.5 million people), in a number of African countries ...

What determines the similarity or dissimilarity of languages ​​among themselves? Let's try to compare a few words of modern Slavic languages.

Russian Belarusian Bulgarian Polish Czech
sun
brother brother brother brat bratr
three trzy try

Probably, after such examples, one might think that there is no need to specifically study the Slavic languages: everything is clear without that! In fact, this is not so: it’s just that words are chosen here that are among the most ancient, primordial, common ...

That's the whole point: comparing languages ​​allows you to look into their history. The similarity of languages ​​testifies to their common origin. No wonder one of the key concepts and terms in the genealogical classification of languages ​​is the family: the more similar languages ​​are, the more likely that they had a common ancestor. As among people, among languages ​​there can be relatives more close and less close. Let's continue the comparisons:
Latin French English German
sol soleil sun die Sonne
frater frere brother der Bruder
tres trois three drei

There is a similarity here, although not so obvious! Apparently, all these languages ​​are also related to Slavic (not to mention the fact that they are related to each other), but at the same time this relationship is not so close.

Such facts have long attracted the attention of scientists. But absolutely dizzying discoveries were made in the middle of the 18th century, when texts written in Sanskrit became known in Europe. Sanskrit is the literary language of ancient India (rich literature, religious and secular, already existed in it in the first millennium BC). The English orientalist W. Jones, who worked for many years in India, drew attention to the fact that many of the left Sanskrit resemble the words of European languages. Indeed, we can compare with the above parallels: "sun" in Sanskrit is svar, "brother" - bhratar, "three" - tri ... But only one conclusion can follow from this: that there was once a language common to the ancestors of modern European and Indian peoples! This language was called Proto-Indo-European. W. Jones himself, speaking with a scientific report in 1786, said: “The Sanskrit language ... has an amazing structure, which contains such a close relationship with Greek and Latin, both in verbal roots and in grammatical forms, that it could not have happened by accident; this relationship is so striking that no philologist who would like to study these languages ​​can not help believing that they all arose from one common source, which, perhaps, no longer exists. There is a similar, though not so convincing, reason to believe that also the Gothic and Celtic languages, although mixed with quite different dialects, are descended from the same source; Old Persian could also be included in the same family of languages. (Quoted from: LoyaYa.V. History of linguistic teachings. - M., 1968. - P. 38.)

Attempts to restore the parent language, which captivated the best philological minds of the 18th-19th centuries, led to the formation of the first scientific method of linguistics (without which it would not have stood out as an independent science). This is a comparative-historical method, i.e. a system of research techniques used in the study of related languages ​​to restore the picture of the historical past of these languages ​​and the patterns of their development. The comparative historical method is based on the idea of ​​the kinship of languages ​​and historical continuity language units and categories. Its main, key concepts include: proto-language (sometimes it is also called the base language), reconstruction, i.e. restoration of ancient forms and meanings not recorded in oral or written speech; archetype - this is the name of a specific reconstructed form, to which later ones are built. Since the archetype is a virtual unit in a sense, existing only on paper and in the imagination of philologists, it is marked with a special icon - an asterisk (*), or an asterix. For example, the Russian word city, as well as the Belarusian city, Bulgarian and Serbian city, czech hrad, Polish grod (the letter 6 denotes the sound [y] here), go back to the Proto-Slavic (that is, common to all ancient Slavs) *gord,b. This archetype has matches in Lithuanian gardas, Albanian garth, English garden, German der Garten, Sanskrit grh? etc., which ultimately allows us to derive the Proto-Indo-European form *ghordho-.

The use of the comparative historical method requires certain conditions to be met. Firstly, only the most ancient, primordial vocabulary should be compared. Good results are also obtained by comparing grammatical forms in order to restore their predecessors: grammar also turns out to be a very stable component of the language system. Secondly, you should beware of random coincidences. And in general, the similarity of the compared units does not have to be literal, but it should be regular. So, if we have established in a number of languages ​​the ratio of the type city - city - grod, etc., which goes back to the Proto-Slavic *gordi>, then it is natural to expect these patterns to be observed in other cases as well, cf.: gunpowder -> dust - proch. .. (Proto-Slavic *porch), cow - krava - krowa... (Proto-Slavic *korva), etc.

The origins of the comparative-historical direction in linguistics were outstanding philologists of the 19th century, who almost simultaneously and independently of each other showed brilliant results in the application of this method. The German Franz Bopp (1791-1867) in his work “On the Sanskrit conjugation system in comparison with the conjugation in Greek, Latin, Persian and Germanic languages” pointed out the need for a systematic comparison of grammatical forms. The Dane Rasmus Raek (1787-1832), dealing with the origin of the Icelandic language, proved on the factual material the relationship of the Germanic, Latin, Greek, Lithuanian and Slavic languages. Jacob Grimm (1785-1863), one of the Grimm brothers known to us from children's fairy tales, studied the history of the Germanic languages ​​using the comparative historical method. Another great German philologist, Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767-1835), demonstrated the importance of this method in the study of culture and human history. He wrote: “Language and the goals of man in general, comprehended through it, the human race in its progressive development and individual peoples are the four objects that, in their mutual connection, should be studied in comparative linguistics” (“Selected Works on Linguistics”).

The most important result of the comparative historical method was, of course, not the restoration of the system of the parent language (although such attempts were made; now there are, in particular, dictionaries and grammars of the Indo-European parent language and even experimental texts written in it), but the enrichment of the amount of knowledge about the history of mankind. Information about the genesis of individual peoples, their contacts and movements, the establishment of general patterns of linguistic evolution, and finally, the creation of a genealogical classification of languages ​​- all this would have been impossible without the use of a comparative historical method.

Genealogical classification implies the division of all the languages ​​of the world into huge associations - families. There are about two dozen such families, the most famous among them are Indo-European, Turkic, Uralic, Caucasian, Afro-Asian (Semitic-Hamitic), Sino-Tibetan, Amerindian, etc.

Each family, in turn, is divided into branches, groups and subgroups. In particular, the Indo-European family includes:
the Indian group (Hindi, Urdu, Bengali, Punjabi, Gujarati, Nepali, Gypsy, etc.; from dead languages ​​- Vedic, Sanskrit, etc.);
Iranian group (Persian, Dari, Pashto, Tajik, Kurdish, Ossetian, etc.; from the dead - Old Persian, Avestan, Scythian, etc.);
Slavic group (Russian, Ukrainian, Belarusian, Bulgarian, Macedonian, Serbian, Croatian, Slovenian, Czech, Slovak, Polish, Lusatian; from the dead - Old Church Slavonic, Polabian);
the Baltic group (Lithuanian, Latvian, from the dead - Prussian);
Germanic group (Danish, Swedish, Norwegian, Icelandic, English, German, Frisian, Dutch, Yiddish, etc.; from the dead - Gothic);
the Romance group (French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Catalan, Romanian, Moldavian, Romansh, etc.; from the dead - Latin);
Celtic group (Irish, Scottish, Breton, Welsh; from the dead - Gallic, etc.);
the Greek group (Modern Greek and Dead Ancient Greek);
Albanian group (Albanian); Armenian group (Armenian);
the Hittite group (dead Hittite and Luwian languages ​​in Asia Minor);
Tocharian group (two dead Tocharian languages ​​in Western China).

The Turkic language family includes, in particular, Turkish, Azerbaijani, Turkmen, Tatar, Bashkir, Kazakh, Kyrgyz, Uzbek, Chuvash; from the dead - Bulgar, Khazar, Polovtsian and Pecheneg languages. Often, the Turkic languages ​​are combined together with the Mongolian (Mongolian, Buryat, Kalmyk) and Tungus-Manchu (Evenk, Manchu, Nanai, etc.) into a single - Altaic - language family.

The Uralic languages ​​break up into Finno-Ugric and Samoyedic. The former include Finnish, Estonian, Karelian, Veps, Hungarian, Mansi, Khanty (Ostyak), Komi, Udmurt, Mari, etc.; to the second - Nenets, Selkup, etc.

The Caucasian languages ​​(whose relationship, however, is disputed by many linguists) include, in particular, Abkhazian, Adyghe, Chechen, Ingush, Lezgi, Avar, Dargin, Lak, Megrelian, Georgian, Svan, etc.

The Afrasian language family includes Arabic, Assyrian, Hebrew, Amharic, Hausa, Bamana, Swahili, Congo, etc.; from the dead - Akkadian (Assyro-Babylonian), Hebrew, Aramaic, Phoenician, Ancient Egyptian, Coptic, etc.

Some languages ​​are outside families: Japanese and Korean are such.

Is it possible to find "bridges", family ties between different language families? If we turn to the expression of the most important and ancient concepts for a person - such as the names of the closest relatives ("father", "mother"), parts of the body ("hand", "eye"), the main natural phenomena("water", "sun"), etc., then a certain lexical similarity can also be found between individual language families. Scientists have hundreds or even thousands of morphemes common to them. This gives grounds to speak of a macrofamily, which includes such families as the Indo-European, Afro-Asian, Caucasian, Ural, Altai, and Dravidian families. This macrofamily is called Nostratic, from the Latin noster "our". Apparently, 8-10 thousand years ago, such a linguistic association was a reality.