Indians. Having taken into account the morphological divergences in a

large number of languages, W. Humboldt suggested a much more embracing typological classification of languages than those suggested by

his predecessors. It was partly a perfected and more scientifically supported variant of Frederic and August Schlegels' morphological classifications. Thus, W. Humboldt grouped all known to him languages into

the following four classes: 1) the isolating languages, which are devoid of the form-building morphemes (like Chinese); 2) the agglutinative languages (like those of the Turkic group); 3) the flexional languages (like the Indo-European or Semitic languages); 4) the incorporating languages of the American Though somewhat restricted, this classification already stood to the

requirements of a regular typological classification of languages. The

main principle upon which it was based was therefore the morphological one. F. Schlegel's classification was followed by some others

which were more all-embracing, like that of August Schlegel (1767 —

1845), who in some places perfected his brother's first attempt of typological classification of languages in the history of European linguistics. This German linguist singled out, on the basis of the same

morphological criterion, three typologically common groups of languages: a) those without any grammatical structure, as they were

called; b) the affixal languages; and c) the flexional languages. The

first two were considered to have been preceded in their historical development by the synthetic languages. The Chinese language and the

languages of Indo-China, however, in which the grammatical relations

between words are realised depending on their placement in syntactic

units, had been singled out as a separate group, though they were not

yet allotted by the scientist to any typologically concrete class.

A decisive step forward in the typological classification of languages on the basis of the same morphological criterion was made by

Wilhelm Humboldt (1761 — 1835), who is considered to be the father

of typology as a new branch of linguistics. The scientist had studied a

great number of languages including those of Polynesia and American

Indians. Having taken into account the morphological divergences in a

large number of languages, W. Humboldt suggested a much more embracing typological classification of languages than those suggested by

A prominent place among the charactereological typologists of the

first half of the 19th century belongs to Franz Bopp (1791 — 1867),

the German linguist who had elaborated and widely implemented the

comparative/Contrastive method of investigation. F. Bopp had introduced a hitherto unknown approach to the typological investigation of

languages on the basis of their syllabic root morphemes structure. On

the ground of this criterion he succeeded and singled out three typologically distinguishable language types, namely: 1) the language type

with the root morpheme consisting of one syllable only (the so-called

monosyllabic languages); 2) the language type in which the root morpheme can combine with other roots and affixal morphemes (like in

most Indo-European languages); 3) the language types with disyllabic

and even trisyllabic root word-structures (as in Semitic languages)

Празький лінгвістичний гурток (Матезіус, Трубецький, Скалічка, Якобсон) та його внесок у типологічні дослідження.

Лінгвісти 20 сторіччя (Сепір, Грінберг, Ісаченко, Мар, Калинович, Жлуктенко) та їхній внесок у типологічні дослідження.