Manual of comparative linguistics - страница 8

Moreover I am to note that despite Greenberg made great work on the field of typology he didn’t actually use those results in his research; he was an adept of megalocomparison and made his conclusions basing on “mass comparison” of lexis but not on structural correlations; his interest in typology was a “glass beads game” and was separated from his actual field of studies.

To those who think, that it’s impossible to estimate number of morphemes since living language always changes, I am to tell that living language doesn’t invent new morphemes every day, especially auxiliary morphemes. The fact that learning a language we can use descriptions of its grammar written some decades ago is the best proof that grammar is a very conservative level of any language.

Hence, we can estimate total number of affixes of a living language as far as we can get its description where all stable forms are represented. And there is no need to care of what can be in a certain language in future, i.e.: we consider current stage of living language and don’t care of possible future stages since they simply don’t exist yet.

As for possibility of count, I am to tell that even set of words is countable set while set of morphemes and especially auxiliary morphemes is not just countable set but also is finite set.

In order to test PAI hypothesis I paid attention to some languages of firmly assembled stocks: Austronesian, Indo-European and Afroasiatic.

2.1.4.1. PAI of languages of Austronesian stock

Polynesian group

Eastern Polynesian Subgroup

Hawaiian 0.82 (calculated after Krupa 1979)

Maori 0.88 (calculated fater Krupa 1967)

Tahitian 0.66 (calculated after Arakin 1981)

Samoan-Tokelauan subgroup

Samoan 0.5 (calculated after Arakin 1973)

Tongic subgroup

Niuean 0.8 (calculated after Polinskaya 1995)

Tongan 0.78 (calculated after Fell 1918)

Philippine group

South Mindanao subgroup

T’boli 0.72 (calculated after Porter 1977)

Northern Luzon subgroup

Pangasinan 0.6 (calculated after Rayner 1923)

Malayo-Sumbawan group

Malay subgroup

Indonesian 0.53 (calculated after Ogloblin 2008)

Pic. 2. Map representing location of Austronesian languages mentioned in current chapter: languages are marked by red, place names are maked by black.