Manual of comparative linguistics - страница 5

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“student” (a word of Chinese origin), essei “essay” (a word of English origin), purinto “print” or, may be, “Japanese” verb guguru “to google”? One can probably say that this example is very special since it was made without so called “basic lexicon”; however, such words are of everyday use and also, as it has been noted above, it is impossible to distinguish so called “basic lexicon” since all lexis is culturally determined and borrowings can be even inside of so called “basic lexis”. Any language can potentially accept thousands of foreign words and still remains the same language until its structure remains the same.

All the above considered facts mean that comparison of lexis should not be base of genetic classification of languages and any researches about genetic affiliation should be based on comparative analysis of structures/grammar, i.e.: analysis and comparison of grammatical systems of compared languages is completely obligatory procedure to prove/test some hypothesis of genetic affiliation of a language. That’s why in current monograph two powerful typological tools are represented.

2. Prefixation Ability Index (PAI) allows us to see whether two languages can potentially be genetically related

2.1. PAI Method


2.1.1. PAI method background

A. P. Volodin pointed on the fact that all languages can be subdivided into two sets by the parameter of presence/absence of prefixation: one group has prefixation and the other has not (Volodin 1997: 9).

The first set was conventionally named set of “American type” linear model of word form7.

According to Volodin American type linear model of word form is the following:


(p) + (r) + R + (s).


The second one was conventionally named set of “Altaiс type” linear model of word form8.

According to Volodin it is the following:


(r) + R + (s)


(p – prefix, s – suffix, R – main root, r – incorporated root; brackets mean that corresponding element can be absent or can be represented several times inside a particular form).


Volodin supposed that there was a border between two sets and that languages belonging to the same set demonstrate certain structural similarities. Also he supposed that typological similarities could probably tell us something about possible routes of ethnic migrations.

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