Associated professor Alimova M. Kh

Universals can be represented in the traditional way with the help of words or with special symbols.

For example:

1. If languages possess prepositions, they possess prefixes either. If they don't have prepositions, they lack prefixes. For example, the English and Russian languages have prepositions and they have prefixes either. Uzbek and other Turkic languages don't have prefixes, but these languages have postpositions.

2. If languages possess dual number, they possess plural number either. For example, in old English pronouns had singular, plural and dual numbers, but in modern English there exist only: singular and plural. Dual number existed in Sanskrit, Greek and ancient Russian.

Etalon language.

It is a linguistic means with the help of which scholars fulfill the process of comparing languages. The notion etalon language is quite new which has been developed and elaborated by the Russian linguist B.A.Uspenskiy. He says that any language is based on the meta- language,which is the same as an etalon language to make transformations from it to real languages and back, from real languages to an etalon.(Uspenskiy B.A.,1965). It is still used for comparative purposes. For practical purposes etalon language can be divided into maximal and minimal.

Maximal etalon language is the whole language with the highly developed structure, which is used for the purpose of comparison.
For example, the Latin language was used as etalon for compiling many European grammars. Minimal etalon language can be expressed by:
1. A special abstract system made for comparison;
2. Some artificial language made for comparison;
3. Special linguistic methods;
4. Grammatical, lexical and other linguistic categories;
5. Typological categories;
6. Concrete language; 7.Semantic fields;
8. Different features concerning the phonetic and grammatical pecularities.