THE DATABASE “LANGUAGES OF THE WORLD” AS A TOOL OF CLASSIFICATION OF LANGUAGES-ISOLATES

Abstract

The article regards seven language isolates included in the fourth version of the “Languages of the World” database: Ainu, Nivkh, Burushaski, Sumerian, Elamite, Hattic, and Korean. So far classic method of comparative linguistics have been unable to give a clear answer on the genetic classification of these languages. The paper looks at the existing hypotheses on the classification of the language isolates and formulates the main goal of the study to be: prove one of the hypotheses or suggest a new one. 173 languages from the “Languages of the World” database are chosen as the study material. Each of the languages is pairwise compared to the others, and only pairs that satisfy the parameters of two-objective optimization established in our previous study are chosen for further analysis. Next for each language the researcher chooses three pairs with the highest percentage of matching feature values. Graphic representation of the received data allows separating the area of pairs of related languages from the area that includes pairs of both related and unrelated languages. The results of the study help hypothesize that Korean belongs to the Mongolic family. It does not contradict the most popular hypothesis that classifies Korean with Altaic macrofamily, and has also been outlined in previous studies.