Synthetic language

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Linguistic typology
Morphological
Morphosyntactic
Word order
Lexicon

A synthetic language uses inflection or agglutination to express syntactic relationships within a sentence. Inflection is the addition of morphemes to a root word that assigns grammatical property to that word, while agglutination is the combination of two or more morphemes into one word. The information added by morphemes can include indications of a word's grammatical category, such as whether a word is the subject or object in the sentence.[1] Morphology can be either relational or derivational.[2]

"The difference between derivational and inflectional morphemes is worth emphasizing. An inflectional morpheme never changes the grammatical category of a word. For example, both old and older are adjectives. The -er inflection here (from Old English -ra) simply creates a different version of the adjective. However, a derivational morpheme can change the grammatical category of a word. The verb teach becomes the noun teacher if we add the derivational morpheme -er (from Old English -ere). So, the suffix -er in modern English can be an inflectional morpheme as part of an adjective and also a distinct derivational morpheme as part of a noun. Just because they look the same (-er) doesn't mean they do the same kind of work." ("The Study of Language," 3rd ed. Cambridge University Press, 2006)[1]

[3]

In synthetic languages, there is a higher morpheme-to-word ratio than in analytic languages. In analytic languages there is a lower morpheme-to-word ratio, and an increased dependence on both separate helping words and word order. In general, there are four main groups of synthetic languages: agglutinating languages, fusional, polysynthetic languages, and Oligosynthetic languages.

Synthetic and analytic languages[edit]

Synthetic languages combine, or synthesize, multiple concepts into each word. Analytic languages break up, or analyze, concepts into separate words. These classifications comprise two ends of a spectrum along which different languages can be classified. For example, English is primarily an analytic language with some synthetic qualities (as in the inflection of certain verbs to show tense, e.g. sail vs. sailed).[4] The distinction is a matter of degree; the most analytic languages consistently have one morpheme per word, while at the other extreme, in polysynthetic languages such as some Native American languages [5] a single inflected verb may contain as much information as an entire English sentence.

Examples[edit]

Languages that are synthetic include: Indo-European languages; all Kartvelian languages such as Georgian; some Semitic languages such as Arabic; some languages of the Dravidian family, including Tamil, Kannada Telugu, and Malayalam; and many languages of the Americas, including Navajo, Nahuatl, Mohawk, and Quechua are synthetic. More specifically, this includes the Indo-European languages of the Romance family (Latin, Italian, French, Portuguese, Spanish, Romanian, etc.), of the Germanic family (German, Dutch language etc.), of the Slavic family (Russian, Ukrainian, Polish, Czech, Bulgarian, Slovak, Serbian or Serbo-Croatian, etc.), of the Indo-Iranian family (Sanskrit, Hindi, Persian, Urdu etc.) as well as Greek, Albanian, Armenian, Latvian, and Lithuanian.

Evolution[edit]

Because languages are constantly changing, many of the examples listed above have drifted away from synthesis over time, becoming more analytical, while others have drifted toward synthesis. For example, the Germanic, Hellenic, and Romance languages were initially very analytic,[citation needed] but incorporated synthetic features over the course of their existence. In contrast, while Modern English is an analytic language, Old English was a heavily synthetic language.[4] Still other languages, such as Slavonic and certain Indo-Aryan languages (such as Sanskrit) have always been synthetic.[6]

Forms of synthesis[edit]

Language exhibits synthesis in two ways: derivational and relational morphology. These methods of synthesis refer to the ways in which morphemes, the smallest grammatical unit in a language, are bound together. Derivational and relational morphology represent opposite ends of a spectrum; that is, a single word in a given language may exhibit varying degrees of both of them simultaneously. Similarly, some words may have derivational morphology while others have relational morphology. Some linguists, however, consider relational morphology to be a type of derivational morphology, which may complicate the classification.[7]

Derivational synthesis[edit]

In derivational synthesis, morphemes of different types (nouns, verbs, affixes, etc.) are joined to create new words. That is, in general, the morphemes being combined are more concrete units of meaning.[7] The morphemes being synthesized in the following examples either belong to a particular grammatical class - such as adjectives, nouns, or prepositions - or are affixes that usually have a single form and meaning:

  • German
    • Aufsichtsratsmitgliederversammlung
      • Aufsichts + Rats + Mitglieder + Versammlung
      • "supervision + council + members + assembly"
      • "Meeting of members of the supervisory board"
        • This word actually contains words of derivational synthesis within it. Mitglieder, meaning "member", is a compound of mit + glied, as in "with + link [of chain]". Similarly, Versammlung is a compound of ver- + sammeln + -ung, or "[state of] + to gather + -ing", with both "ver-" and "-ung" being bound morphemes.
  • Greek
    • προπαροξυτόνησις (proparoxutónesis)
  • Polish
  • English
    • antidisestablishmentarianism
      • anti- + dis- + establish + -ment + -arian + -ism
      • "against + ending + to institute + [noun suffix] + advocate + ideology"
      • "the movement to prevent revoking the Church of England's status as the official church [of England, Ireland, and Wales]."
    • English word chains such as child labour law may count as well, because it is merely an orthographic convention to write them as isolated words. Grammatically and phonetically they behave like one word (stress on the first syllable, plural morpheme at the end).
  • Russian
  • Malayalam
    • അങ്ങനെയല്ലാതായിരിക്കുമ്പോളൊക്കെത്തന്നെ (aṅṅaneyallātāyirikkumpēāḷeākkettanne)
      • "such/so + not + has + been + when + occasions + all + exclusively"
      • "on all such occasions when it has been not so"
  • Finnish
  • Persian
  • international classical compounds based on Greek and Latin
    • hypercholesterolemia (υπερχοληστερολαιμία)

Relational synthesis[edit]

In relational synthesis, root words are joined to bound morphemes to show grammatical function. In other words, it involves the combination of more abstract units of meaning than derivational synthesis.[7] In the following examples note that many of the morphemes are related to voice (e.g. passive voice), whether a word is in the subject or object of the sentence, possession, plurality, or other abstract distinctions in a language:

  • Italian
    • comunicandovele
      • comunic + ando + ve + le
      • "communicate + [gerund suffix] + plural you + feminine plural those"
      • 'Communicating those[feminine plural] to you[plural]'
  • Spanish
    • escribiéndomelo
      • escrib + iéndo + me + lo
      • "write + [gerund suffix] + me + it"
      • 'Writing it to me'
  • Nahuatl
  • Latin
  • Albanian
    • jepmani
      • "give + to me + it[singular] + you[plural] + [imperative mood]"
      • 'You, give it to me'
  • Japanese
    • 見させられがたい (misaseraregatai)
      • 見 + させ + られ + がたい (mi - sase - rare - gatai)
      • "see + [causative tense] + [passive tense] + difficult"
      • 'It's difficult to be shown [this]'
  • Finnish
  • Hungarian
    • házaitokban
      • ház + -a + -i + -tok + -ban
      • "house + [possession] + [plural] + your[plural] + in"
      • 'In your houses',
    • szeretlek
      • szeret + lek
      • "love + I [reflexive] you"
      • 'I love you'
  • Turkish
    • Afyonkarahisarlılaştıramayabileceklerimizden misiniz?
      • Afyonkarahisar + -lı + laş + tıra + -ma + ya + bil + -ecek + -ler + -imiz + -den + misiniz?
      • "Afyonkarahisar + citizen of + transform + [passive] + not + be able + [future tense] + [plural] + we + among + [you-plural-future-question]?"
      • "Are you[plural] amongst the ones whom we might not be able to make citizens of Afyonkarahisar?"
  • Georgian
    • გადმოგჳახტუნებინებდნენო (gadmogwaxṭunebinebdneno)
    • The word describes the whole sentence that incorporates tense, subject, object, relation between them, direction of the action, conditional and causative markers etc.

Types of synthetic languages[edit]

Agglutinating languages[edit]

Agglutinating languages have a high rate of agglutination in their words and sentences, meaning that the morphological construction of words consists of distinct morphemes that usually carry a single unique meaning.[8] These morphemes always look the same no matter what word they are in, so it is easy to separate a word into its individual morphemes.[1] Note that morphemes may be bound (that is, they must be attached to a word to have meaning, like affixes) or free (they can stand alone and still have meaning).

  • Swahili is an agglutinating language.[1] For example, distinct morphemes are used in the conjugation of verbs:
    • Ni-na-soma: I-present-read or I am reading
    • U-na-soma: you-present-read or you are reading
    • A-na-soma: s/he-present-read or s/he is reading

Fusional languages[edit]

Fusional languages are similar to agglutinating languages in that they involve the combination of many distinct morphemes. However, morphemes in fusional languages are often assigned several different lexical meanings, and they tend to be fused together so that it is difficult to separate individual morphemes from one another.[9][1]

Polysynthetic[edit]

Polysynthetic languages are considered the most synthetic of the three types because they combine multiple stems as well as other morphemes into a single continuous word. These languages often turn nouns into verbs.[1] Many Native Alaskan and other Native American languages are polysynthetic.

  • Mohawk: Washakotya'tawitsherahetkvhta'se means "He ruined her dress" (strictly, 'He made the-thing-that-one-puts-on-one's body ugly for her'). This one inflected verb in a polysynthetic language expresses an idea that can only be conveyed using multiple words in a more analytic language such as English.

Oligosynthetic[edit]

Oligosynthetic languages are a theoretical notion created by Benjamin Whorf with no known examples existing in natural languages. Such languages would be functionally synthetic, but make use of a very limited array of morphemes (perhaps just a few hundred). Whorf proposed that Nahuatl, a Mayan language, was oligosynthetic, but this has since been discounted by most linguists.[citation needed]

Degrees of synthesis[edit]

In order to demonstrate the nature of the analytic–synthetic–polysynthetic classification as a "continuum", some examples are shown below:

More analytic[edit]

  • Mandarin lacks inflectional morphology almost entirely, and most words consist of either one or two syllable morphemes, especially two due to the very numerous compound words. This makes it noticeably more analytic than many other languages, even slightly more so than English.
明天 我 的 朋友 会 为 我 做 生日 蛋糕
míngtiān wǒ de péngyou huì wèi wǒ zuò shēngri dàngāo
tomorrow day I of friend friend will for I do birth day egg cake (literal)
tomorrow I (genitive particle(='s)) friend will for I make birthday cake
"Tomorrow my friend(s) will make a birthday cake for me."

However, with rare exceptions, each syllable in Mandarin (corresponding to a single written character) represents a morpheme with an identifiable meaning, even if many of such morphemes are bound. This gives rise to the common misconception that Chinese consists exclusively of "words of one syllable". As the sentence above illustrates, however, even simple Chinese words such as míngtiān 'tomorrow' (míng "bright" + tīan "day") and péngyou 'friend' (a compound of péng and yǒu, both of which mean 'friend') are synthetic compound words. This is of interest for reconstruction of hypothesized nostratic and proto-world languages.[citation needed]

The Chinese language of the Classic works, and of Confucius for example, is more strictly monosyllabic (and southern dialects to a certain extent): each character represents one word. The evolution of modern Mandarin Chinese was accompanied by a reduction in the total number of phonemes. Words which previously were phonetically distinct became homophones. Many disyllabic words in modern Mandarin are the result of joining two related words (such as péngyou, literally "friend-friend") in order to resolve the phonetic ambiguity. A similar process is observed in some English dialects. For instance, in the Southern dialect of American English, it is not unusual for the short vowel sounds ĕ and i to be indistinguishable before nasal consonants: thus the words "pen" and "pin" are homophones (see pin-pen merger). In this dialect, the ambiguity is often resolved by using the compounds "ink-pen" and "stick-pin", in order to clarify which "p*n" is being discussed.

Rather analytic[edit]

  • English:
    • "He travelled by hovercraft on the sea" is largely isolating, but travelled (although it is possible to say "did travel" instead) and hovercraft each have two morphemes per word, the former being an example of relational synthesis (inflection), and the latter of compounding synthesis (a special case of derivation with another free morpheme instead of a bound one).

Rather synthetic[edit]

  • Japanese:
    • 私たちにとって、この泣く子供の写真は見せられがたいものです。 Watashitachi ni totte, kono naku kodomo no shashin wa miseraregatai mono desu means strictly literally, "To us, these photos of a child crying are things that are difficult to be shown," meaning 'We cannot bear being shown these photos of a child crying' in more idiomatic English. In the example, most words have more than one morpheme and some have up to five.

Very synthetic[edit]

  • Finnish:
    • Käyttäytyessään tottelemattomasti oppilas saa jälki-istuntoa
    • "Should he behave in an insubordinate manner, the student will get detention."
    • Structurally: behaviour (present/future tense) (of his) obey (without) (in the manner/style) studying (he who (should be)) gets detention (some). Practically every word is derived and/or inflected. However, this is quite formal language, and (especially in speech) would have various words replaced by more analytic structures: Kun oppilas käyttäytyy tottelemattomasti, hän saa jälki-istuntoa meaning 'When the student behaves in an insubordinate manner, he will get detention'.
  • Georgian:
    • gadmogvakhtunebinebdneno (gad-mo-gw-a-xtun-eb-in-eb-d-nen-o)
    • 'They said that they would be forced by them (the others) to make someone to jump over in this direction'.
    • The word describes the whole sentence that incorporates tense, subject, direct and indirect objects, their plurality, relation between them, direction of the action, conditional and causative markers, etc.
  • Classical Arabic:
    • أوأعطيناكموه عبثًا؟ awaʼāʻṭaynākumūhu ʻabathan (a-wa-aʻṭay-nā-ku-mū-hu ʻabath-an)
    • "And did we give it (masc.) to you futilely?" in Arabic, each word consists of one root that has a basic meaning (aʻṭā  'give' and ʻabath  'futile'). Prefixes and suffixes are added to make the word incorporate subject, direct and indirect objects, number, gender, definiteness, etc.

See also[edit]

References[edit]

  1. ^ a b c d e Dawson, Hope C.; Phelan, Michael, eds. (2016). Language Files (12 ed.). Ohio State University. pp. 172–175.
  2. ^ Dawson, Hope C.; Phelan, Michael, eds. (2016). Language Files (12 ed.). Ohio State University. p. 156.
  3. ^ Nordquist, Richard. "What Are Inflectional Morphemes?". ThoughtCo. Retrieved 2018-12-12.
  4. ^ a b "Word Order and Cases".
  5. ^ "synthetic language". Encyclopaedia Britannica. Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc. Retrieved 9 December 2018. |first1= missing |last1= in Authors list (help)
  6. ^ Trithen, Francis Henry (1854). "On the position occupied by the Slavonic Dialects among the other Languages of the Indo-European family". Proceedings of the Philological Society. 5 (102): 7–26.
  7. ^ a b c Sapir, Edward. "Language: An Introduction to the Study of Speech". Retrieved 9 December 2018.
  8. ^ "Agglutinating language". Glottopedia. Retrieved 9 December 2018.
  9. ^ "Fusional Language". Glossary of Linguistic Terms. 2015-12-04. Retrieved 9 December 2018.

External links[edit]

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