Chris BONDE wrote:
.
Some linguists categorized world languages into four language types:
agglutinative languages (Korean, Turkish, Japanese ...), incorporating
languages (Inuit, Basque, Aynu ...), isolated languages (Chinese,
Thai, Vietnamese ...) and inflectional language (English, French,
German ...)
And this means ... ?
I have been told other catagories such as Romance, Germanic, etc
"Romance", "Germanic", etc., are families of historically related
languages. (Actually, Romance and Germanic are subfamilies within the
great Indo-European family, which includes almost, but not quite all of
the languages of Europe, Iran, and North India. The prevailing theory is
that the common ancestor, known as "Proto-Indo-European", was spoken
somewhere around Ukraine about 5,000 years ago.)
"Isolating" (or "analytic"), "agglutinative", "inflectional" (or
"synthetic"), and "incorporating" (or "polysynthetic"), on the other
hand, are basic types of grammar. All languages fall more or less into
one of these four groups.
--
John W. Kennedy
"Those in the seat of power oft forget their failings and seek only the
obeisance of others! Thus is bad government born! Hold in your heart
that you and the people are one, human beings all, and good government
shall arise of its own accord! Such is the path of virtue!"
-- Kazuo Koike. "Lone Wolf and Cub: Thirteen Strings" (tr. Dana Lewis)
