Joseph Greenberg
About Joseph Greenberg
Terms in Greenburg (relevant to language typology)
Diachronic: looking at something (i.e., language) in respect to the passage of time
Synchronic: looking at something at a given moment in time.
See explanations here in regard to linguistics.
Ways to Categorize Languages:
Genetic (historical or diachronic)
Morphology
Word order (Syntax)
Phonology
Types of Nouns or Verbs or Prepositions/adpositions
Types of languages in relation to the number of morphemes in a word:
| Type | Morpheme to Word ratio | Examples |
| Isolating | a word is usually one morpheme | Chinese, English |
| Synthetic | there is usually more than one morpheme per word | German, Japanese |
| Polysynthetic | there are a large number of morphemes per word | Mohawk, Yup’ik Inuit |
Linguistic Typology Resources from the Association of Linguistic Typology (what did I say about geeks with specific interests?)
(includes a database of universals)