Rus va ingliz tillari kafedrasi roman-german filologiyasiga kirish

particularly of the ages of language families without documented histories. 
The basic premise of glottochronology is the fact that the basic vocabulary of 

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human language tends to be replaced at a constant rate throughout its development. 
This approach is based on the principle stated by E. Sapir who said that the greater 
the degree of linguistic differentiation within the group, the greater was the period of 
time that must be assumed for the development of such differentiation. 
If we could measure the degree of differentiation of two related languages, this 
would show the relative Length of time that they had been diverging from their 
common ancestor: it would be glottochronology (from Greek glotta "language" and 
chronos "time"). 
The glottochronological method involves three principle variables: the rate of 
retention, the period of time and the proportion of coinciding test list equivalents in 
two languages that are related. 
The formula for finding the rate of retention is t=log c ^ log r in which t=the period 
of time between two stages of a language, c=the proportion of common forms, and 
r=the rate of retention. With this formula, it was found that the rate of retention is 
approximately 80 per cent per thousand years. 
Glottochronology is the study of the rate of change in language, and the use of the 
rate for historical inference, especially for the estimation of the age of a language and 
its use to provide a pattern of internal relationships within a language family. 
In principle, glottochronology should be applied only after the comparative 
method has prepared the ground, and it is of use mainly for languages with long 
historical stages of more than a thousand years. 
Even in ideal conditions, glottochronological dates provide only a rough 
estimate of the most probable date when the related languages diverged. Practically, 
different investigators give different data for the divergence dates of linguistic 
families. M. Swadesh, an American linguist who supports this method passionately, 
gives, for example, a time depth of 46 centuries since the minimum divergence 
between Aleut and south-west Greenlandic, considering this a unit of the fullest 
divergence in the family. The exact calculation depends on many factors, such as, for 
example, differences in the judgment of cognates, differences in the material selected 
from within a family, etc. 
Thus, the divergence times revealed by the glottochronological method are not 
all accepted, since the use of this method has not been generally recognized. Beyond 
this, we may consider comparable those divergence times in which we have a good 
deal of confidence, and our degree of confidence must depend upon the 
circumstances. We can be more confident in divergence times that are confirmed by 
evidence from other sources. Swedish was quite right when he wrote: 
"Lexicostatistical data must be coupled with other evidence, including that of 
archaeology, comparative ethnography, and linguistic paleontology. The separate 
lines of study serve to verify or correct one another and to fill in details of the story." 

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Many linguists attack glottochronology for basing itself on the false premise 
that, when languages begin to diverge, -the separation is sharp and complete. Besides, 
it is doubtful whether the vocabulary of one language family changes at the same rate 
as that of another. What has been established for Indo-European languages cannot 
necessary be applied to other families? Then again, one should bear in mind that the 
test list of words taken for statistical calculation includes items of vocabulary which 
have been subject to various cultural influences. We must be very careful in the 
application of mathematical techniques to the measurement of linguistic change. 
Some of them must be abandoned as groundless. 
Only the comparative method that emerged at the beginning of the 19th 
century, now coupled with other methods which, taken together, help to penetrate 
deeper into the prehistoric past of the Indo-European languages, can be considered a 
really sound approach to the understanding of the history of language.