1. ESSENTIALS OF COMPARATIVE LINGUISTICS

2. BRANCHES OF COMPARATIVE LINGUISTICS
phonetical
morphological, and syntactic
lexical

3. ASPECTS OF COMPARATIVE LINGUISTICS
synchronical
diachronical

4. PRACTICAL AIMS OF COMPARATIVE LINGUISTICS
1) translation practice;
2) compiling dictionaries;
3) teaching foreign languages.

5. METHODS OF COMPARATIVE LINGUISTIC RESEARCH
SPECIFIC METHODS:
contrastive;
historical and comparative.
OTHER METHODS:
1) descriptive; 2) experimental; 3) statistic; 4) transformational; 5) substitutional; 6) intermediate and ultimate constituents analysis; 7) inductive (comparing language data on the ground of certain criteria); 8) deductive (working out criteria for comparison) methodology.

6. TERMINOLOGY OF COMPARATIVE LINGUISTIC RESEARCH
Language Universals
Language Type
Typological dominant features
Typological recessive features
Isomorphic (common) and allomorphic (divergent) features
Metalanguage
An Etalon Language
A World Language
Artificial Languages
Language Norm
Speech Norm

7. History of Comparative Linguistics
the end of the 18th century up to the middle of the 19th century, which is called the beginning of comparative research;
the end of the 19th century – the period of neogrammarian studies, when linguists started comparing living languages;
the beginning of the 20th century up to the present – the period of structural and functional approaches to language.

8. W. von Humboldt’s Classification of Languages
isolating (like Chinese);
agglutinative (like Turkish);
flexional (like Russian, Ukrainian);
incorporating (languages of American Indians).

9. LANGUAGE CLASSIFICATIONS

11. NUMBER OF SPEAKERS (estimated statistics in the early 1980-s)
Indo-European
Sino-Tibetan
Niger-Congo
Afro-Asiatic
Ausronesian
Dravidian
Japanese
Altaic
Austro-Asiatic
Korean
Tai
Nilo-Saharan
Amerindian
Uralic
2,000,000,000
1,040,000,000
260,000,000
230,000,000
200,000,000
140,000,000
120,000,000
90,000,000
60,000,000
50,000,000
30,000,000
25,000,000
23,000,000

12. THE INDO-EUROPEAN FAMILY
The Indo-Iranian Group
The Baltic Group
The Slavic Group
The Hellenic group
The Romance Group
The Germanic Group
The Celtic Group
The Albanian Language
The Armenian Language

13. Bulgarian, Serbian, Croatian, Macedonian, and Slovene
THE SLAVIC LANGUAGES
GROUPS
Western
Polish, Czech, Slovak, Sorbian, and Kashubian
Eastern
Russian, Ukrainian, and Byelorussian
Southern
Bulgarian, Serbian, Croatian, Macedonian, and Slovene

14. THE GERMANIC LANGUAGES
GROUPS
Western
English, German, Dutch, Flemish, Afrikaans, Yiddish, and Frisian
Eastern
Gothic
(dead)
Northern
Swedish, Danish, Norwegian, Icelandic, and Faeroese

15. TABLE OF TYPOLOGICAL FEATURES (according to V. Skalichka)

16. TYPES OF LANGUAGES (morphological classification)
agglutinative ;
inflecting (fusion);
isolating ;
polysynthetic;
introflexional (Arabic, Hebrew).

17. Agglutinative Languages
Words are built up out of a long sequence of units, with each unit expressing a particular grammatical meaning, in a clear one-to-one way, e.g., one for each category of person, number, tense, voice, and mood. Affixes may be “glued” to the stem of word to add to its meaning or to show its grammatical function, e.g., in Swahili wametulipa “they have paid us” consists of
wa me tu +lipa
they perfective us pay
marker
Languages which are highly agglutinative include Finnish, Hungarian, Japanese, Swahili, and Turkish, although there is no clear-cut distinction between agglutinative, inflecting, and isolating languages.

18. Inflecting (fusion) Languages
The form of a word is changed to show a shift in meaning or grammatical function. Often there is no clear distinction between the basic part of the word and the part which shows a grammatical function such as number or tense. For e.g.: mice (= mouse + plural); came (= come + past tense). Greek, Latin, English, Russian, and Ukrainian are inflecting languages, though English is analytical, whereas other languages mentioned are synthetical (with more inflections and fewer auxiliaries).

19. ANALYTICAL & SYNTHETICAL LANGUAGES
Grammatical meaning is synthesized with the lexical one within the word form. Grammatical meaning is realized by means of inflections and word-forming affixes, sound interchange (ablaut), and suppletivity.
ANALYTICAL LANGUAGES
Lexical meaning is realized by notional words, while grammatical – by auxiliaries, word order, and intonation. Analytization is extremely intensive and is manifested in the functional synonymy of case-inflections, reduction of the noun-paradigm, word-order fixation, predominance of adjoinment in word-phrase relations, abundance of paradigmatic forms (Continuous, Perfect, Perfect Continuous), predominance of conversion, postposition formation and phrasing among word-building patterns, abundance of function-words.

20. Isolating Languages
They lack inflexions. Word forms do not change, and in which grammatical functions are shown by word order and the use of function words, e. g. in Mandarin Chinese: júzi wõ chi le orange I eat (function word) “I ate the orange” wõ chî le júzi le I eat (f.w.) orange (f.w.) “I ate an orange” Languages, which are highly isolating include Chinese, Samoan, and Vietnamese.

21. Polysynthetic (Incorporating) Languages
Different parts of the utterance are united in the form of amorphous word-stems (roots). Their unity gets auxiliary elements. Compound words look like sentences. Words are very long, containing a mixture of agglutinative and inflectional features. In Tiwi ngirruunthingapukani (‘I kept on eating’) is:
ngi – rru – unthing – apu – kani
I past tense for some time eat repeatedly
Chukot, Eskimo, Papuan, and the languages of American Indians & Australian aborigines possess such features.

22. 2) nominative; 3) ergative .
SYNTACTIC CLASSIFICATION OF LANGUAUGES (I. I. Meshchaninov’s classification)
1) passive;
2) nominative;
3) ergative .

23. PHONETIC CLASSIFICATION OF LANGUAGES (O. Isachenko’s Classification)
Vocalic Languages;
Consonantal Languages.

24. LANGUAGE CHANGE REASONS INTERNAL EXTERNAL Democratic Society;
Learning;
Printing;
Mass media;
Language contacts.
EXTERNAL
Communication;
Expressive & information functions;
Language norm;
Language potential.