A Basic Course in Anthropological Linguistics (Studies in Linguistic ...

WORDS 83
The American linguist Joseph Greenberg (1968) refined Sapir 's typological
method, making it more precise, introducing the concept of the morphological
index. The index is derived by taking a representative and large sample of text,
counting the words and the morphemes in it, and then dividing the number of
morphemes by the number of words. The index is, obviously, the average
number of morphemes per word (I = index, M = number of morphemes, W =
number of words):
In a perfectly isolating language, the I will be equal to 1, because there is
a perfect match between number of words (W) and number of morphemes
(M), or M = W. In agglutinating languages, the M will be greater than W. The
greater it is, the higher the index, and thus, the higher the degree of agglutination.
The highest index Greenberg discovered with his method was 3.72 for Eskimo.
Greenberg suggested that:
languages in the 1 .O-2.2 range be classified as analytic;
languages in the 2.2-3.0 range be classified as synthetic;
languages in the 3.0 and above range be classified as polysynthetic.
The main weakness in classifying languages in this way lies in the lack of
a definitive method for determining what constitutes a word in one language
or another. The classification of languages according to morphemic criteria
has, nevertheless, gained wide acceptance because of the central role of words
in the phenomenon of language.
Assigning languages to different types involves a delicate procedure of
balancing one part of the grammar against another and deciding which type of
structure predominates and how well the other types are represented. This is
why linguists also use historical criteria to group languages together. As discussed
in previous chapters, language families can be established on the basis of descent;
i.e., on the basis of unbroken development from an earlier common parent
language. Though the two types of classification-historical and
morphological-may coincide in classifying certain languages consistently, as
is the case to a great extent in the case of the languages of the Bantu family,
they do not coincide in all cases.