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35349 History of the English Language
Outlines
UNIT 3.1
I. LANGUAGE FAMILIES AND LINGUISTIC TYPOLOGY
A. Syllabic division
A) Consonant + Vowel (CV) labelled ‘open syllable’
a. Japanese, Arabic, Fijian
B) Vowel + Consonant (VC) labelled ‘(blocked/checked/closed)
syllable’
a. Germanic languages (e.g. Swedish and Danish tidskrift
"periodical", German schwatzhaft "talkative", Netherlandic herfst
"autumn" or English strength)
B. Morphosyntactic division (Wilhelm von Humboldt, 1822; our model after
Nikolaus Finck, 1909)
A) ‘Isolating’ (also called ‘monosyllabic’ or ‘analytic’) languages (e.g.
Classical Chinese, Vietnamese). These show isolated, invariable
morphemes, monosyllables and no affixation. They can be subdivided
into:
a. ‘root-isolating’ languages: words are invariable morphs (e.g.
Mandarin Chinese)
b. ‘stem-isolating’ languages: are characterised by possible
desinential inflection which allows for a certain degree of
grammatical order (e.g. Samoan, Indonesian)
B) ‘Agglutinative’ languages (e.g. Turkish, Hungarian, Finnish,
Japanese). These possess several syllables, stem and a certain number
of regular affixes
C) ‘Inflective’ (also called ‘flectional’, ‘inflectional’, ‘amalgamating’,
‘fusional’, ‘fusing’, ‘formal’ or ‘synthetic’ -but see below for specific
labelling) languages (e.g. Latin). These languages possess stem +
various affixes; regular affixation is used with grammatical
(morphological and syntactical) value. They can be subdivided into:
a. ‘Root-inflected’, also called ‘fusional’, or ‘fusing’ which
modify the radical vowel (e.g. Arabic)
b. ‘Stem-inflected’ that modify the inflections (e.g. Latin,
Sanskrit)
c. ‘Group-inflected’ or ‘amalgamating’, which modify entire
groups in free interrelation (e.g. Georgian)
D) ‘Incorporative’, ‘polysynthetic’, ‘agglomerative’, or ‘holophrastic’
languages (e.g. Eskimo and many native American languages including
the Macro-Algonkians of Eastern and central USA plus Eastern and
Central Canada and the Chinookan (e.g. British Columbia) among
them. In these languages verb + subject + objects are all condensed in
one word
E) Objections to this classification:
a. It is based upon biological assumptions that Early Man spoke
in monosyllables and that languages develop organically until
they reach the stage of the flective (Latin, Greek, Germanic)
languages, the same way life has developed from unicellular
