THE ORIGIN AND POSITION OF ENGLISH LAMONG OTHER LANGUAGES OF THE WORLD

The earliest source of the English language as a prehistoric language that modem scholars call Proto-Indo-European (PIE) was probably spoken about 5,000 years ago by people who lived in the area north of the Black Sea, in southeastern Europe. These people migrated through the centuries and gradually developed new languages. One group migrated west and divided into groups who spoke languages that were the ancestors of the Germanic, Creek, and Latin tongues. The Germanic languages developed into English, Danish, Dutch, German, Norwegian, and Swedish. The ancient Greek language became modern Greek, and early Latin grew into French, Italian, and Spanish.

About 2500 languages are spoken in the world. They may be classified in different ways, acc. to diff. classifications.

The classification or languages according to their kinship is called the genealogical classification. According to this classification languages were divided into "families".

A family consists of languages which developed from the tribal dialects of ancient people. Having lost touch with each other these dialects developed into separate tongues of the same family.

The Germanic languages are divided in their turn into north-Germanic (Scandinavian, Old Horse) West Germanic (English, German Dutch etc.) and East-Germanic to which Gothic belongs.

Hittite [‘hıtaıt] member of an ancient people who lived in the area of modern Turkey and Syria between about 900 and 700 BC.

There are twelve branches within the indo-European family of languages, they are the following: 1) Indian, 2) Iranian, 3) Armenian, 4) Hellenic or Greek, 5) Italian or Romanic, 6) Albanian, 7) Germanic or Teutonic, 8) Baltic, 9) Slavonic, 10) Celtic, 11) Hittite, 12) Tocharian, (the last two being dead languages).

The English language belongs to the West-Germanic branch of the Indo-European family of languages.

The classification of languages based on the morphological structure of the word is called the morphological classification. According to this classification languages are divided into those, which have affixes and those, which have no affixes.

1. Languages that have affixes fall into two groups: a) agglutinative and b) inflected.

In agglutinative languages each affix has only one grammatical or lexical meaning. For example: in Kazah the suffix "lar " expresses plurality; "bala" -a child, “ balalar” children. "At" -"a horse", "at tar" - horses (here assimilation takes place) " at-tar-da" -on the horses (the affixes ta/da-exprese the idea of place).

In agglutinative languages affixes do not become merged with the root or other affixes, their boundaries are always distinct. Agglutinative languages are Ugro-finish, Turkish etc.

In inflected languages affixes are polysemantic. Let us take for example the English suffix " s" (plural of nouns, third person singular of verbs, the Possessive Case). Besides, several affixes may express the same grammatical meaning. For example the Russian plural of nouns may be expressed in different ways as well as the English. Inflected languages are all Indo-European languages. According to morphological classification English is also inflected language.

Languages which have no affixes and are characterized by lack of inflection, are called isolating, sometimes amorphous such as Chinese, Vietnamese etc.

Besides inflected, agglutinative, and isolating languages there are the so-called polysynthetic or incorporated languages. In such languages a word is a whole sentence. The languages of American Indians belong to this group.

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