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their former dominant role as, for instance, case forms in English or
the dual number forms of some nouns in present-day Ukrainian.
The Etalon Language is a hypothetic language created by
topologists for the sake of contrasting any languages. This
“language” is supposed to contain exhaustive quantitative and
qualitative data or characteristics concerning all existing language
units and phenomena. For example, the quantity and quality of
sounds (vowels, consonants) and syllables, morphemes, parts of
speech and their morphological categories, the correlation of the
means of grammatical connection, etc.

Questions for self-assessment

1. Which linguistic disciplines deal with the contrastive studies of
languages? State the difference between them.
2. What differences can the languages have according to the
content?
3. What differences can the languages have according to the
expression means?
4. Describe other methods in contrastive language studies.
5. Name other principle terms and notions used in CG.

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