Synthetic language

Synthetic language
A synthetic language is a language which is statistically characterized by a higher morpheme-to-word ratio. In contrast to analytic languages, which break up concepts into separate words, synthetic languages combine (synthesize) them into a single word. Syntactic roles embodied by a word, such as a subject or an object, are assigned by adding affixes (characteristic for fusional languages, a subtype of synthetic languages). In the present-day English, once a fusional language, only a few remnants of its fusional origin are retained: for example, the role of an object is assigned to the word "who" by adding affix "m" to it (resulting in "whom"); tense is assigned by adding -ed and -ing to a verb; a possessive role is assigned by adding an apostrophe and 's' to it; by adding affix -er either a comparative form is assigned (resulting in faster) or verb is turned into a noun (teach-er). Analytic languages predominantly use auxiliary verbs and word order.
Combining two or more morphemes into one word is used in agglutinating languages, instead. Subsubcategories include polysynthetic languages (most of them in an agglutinative subcategory, with an exception of Navajo and other Athabaskan languages that are often categorized as fusional), and oligosynthetic languages (only found in constructed languages).
Derivational vs relational
Derivational and relational synthesis represent opposite ends of a spectrum. In derivational synthesis, various whole nouns, verbs, and affixes are combined to create new words with distinct concrete meanings. On the other hand, relational synthesis involves attaching affixes to a root word to assign it a syntactic role within a sentence. A single root can participate in both types of synthesis, each occurring with varying frequencies.
Derivational synthesis examples
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:
English derivational synthesis example
German derivational synthesis
Greek derivational synthesis
Polish derivational synthesis
Russian derivational synthesis
Malayalam derivational synthesis
"such/so + not + has + been + when + occasions + all + exclusively"
"on all such occasions when it has been not so"
Persian derivational synthesis
Ukrainian derivational synthesis
international classical compounds based on Greek and Latin derivational synthesis
alternately, cholesterol can be read as chole- + + -ol, as in "bile + solid + [alcohol suffix]", or "the solid alcohol present in bile".
Relational synthesis
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. In the following examples 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
Spanish
Nahuatl
Latin
Albanian
"give + to me + it[singular] + you[plural] + [imperative mood]"
'You, give it to me'
Japanese
Finnish
Hungarian
Turkish
Georgian
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
Agglutinating languages
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. These morphemes tend to look the same no matter what word they are in, so it is easy to separate a word into its individual morphemes. 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. 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
In fusional languages, short morphemes (for example, inflectional affixes) tend to denote several different syntactic roles assigned to a root word they are attached to. Also, they tend to be fused together so that it is difficult to separate individual morphemes from one another.
Polysynthetic
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. 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
Oligosynthetic languages are a theoretical notion created by Benjamin Whorf. Such languages would be functionally synthetic, but make use of a very limited array of morphemes (perhaps just a few hundred). The concept of an oligosynthetic language type was proposed by Whorf to describe the Native American language Nahuatl, although he did not further pursue this idea. Though no natural language uses this process, it has found its use in the world of constructed languages, in auxlangs such as aUI.
Synthetic and analytic languages
The distinction between synthetic and analytic language is a matter of degree. At the most analytic end of the spectrum, in the isolating languages, each word consists of only one morpheme, while at the other end of the spectrum, in polysynthetic languages such as some Native American languages, a single word consists of as many morphemes as an entire English sentence.
In order to demonstrate the nature of the isolating–analytic–synthetic–polysynthetic classification as a "continuum", some examples are shown below.
Isolating
Mandarin lacks inflectional morphology almost entirely, and most words consist of either one- or two-syllable morphemes, with compound words words being very numerous.
However, with rare exceptions, in Mandarin each syllable (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". Although this may be true both in the case of southern dialects and classical texts, in modern Mandarin two related words (such as péngyou, literally "friend-friend") may be merged into a disyllabic word, in order to resolve the phonetic ambiguity. Another example of a synthetic compound word in Mandarin is míngtiān 'tomorrow' (míng "next" + tīan "day").
A similar process is observed in the Southern dialects of American English, where it is not unusual for the short vowel sounds and to be indistinguishable before nasal consonants: thus the words "pen" and "pin" are homophones (see pin-pen merger). In these dialects, the ambiguity is often resolved by using the compounds "ink-pen" and "stick-pin", in order to clarify which "p*n" is being discussed.
Analytic
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
Japanese:
means strictly literally: "To us, these photos of a child crying are things that are difficult to be shown", meaning 'We cannot bear to be 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.
Hebrew:
"Yesterday I told my friends about the idea I was thinking about". From this example we can see that Hebrew verbs are conjugated by tense, mood, and person (including gender and number). In addition, there are prepositions that are conjugated, but by person, like and . More at Modern Hebrew grammar.
Very synthetic
Finnish:
Käyttäytyessään tottelemattomasti oppilas saa jälki-istuntoa
"Should they behave in an insubordinate manner, the student will get detention."
Structurally: behaviour (present/future tense) (of their) obey (without) (in the manner/style) studying (they 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 'When the student behaves in an insubordinate manner, they will get detention'.
Georgian:
gadmogvakht'unebinebdneno (gad-mo-gv-a-kht'un-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:
"And did we give it (masc.) to you futilely?" in Arabic, each word consists of one root that has a basic meaning ('give' and 'futile'). Prefixes and suffixes are added to make the word incorporate subject, direct and indirect objects, number, gender, definiteness, etc.
Increase in analyticity
Haspelmath and Michaelis observed that analyticity is increasing in a number of European languages. In the German example, the first phrase makes use of inflection, but the second phrase uses a preposition. The development of preposition suggests the moving from synthetic to analytic.
It has been argued that analytic grammatical structures are easier for adults learning a foreign language. Consequently, a larger proportion of non-native speakers learning a language over the course of its historical development may lead to a simpler morphology, as the preferences of adult learners get passed on to second generation native speakers. This is especially noticeable in the grammar of creole languages. A 2010 paper in PLOS ONE suggests that evidence for this hypothesis can be seen in correlations between morphological complexity and factors such as the number of speakers of a language, geographic spread, and the degree of inter-linguistic contact.
According to Ghil'ad Zuckermann, Modern Hebrew (which he calls "Israeli") "is much more analytic, both with nouns and verbs", compared with Classical Hebrew (which he calls "Hebrew").
See also
Analytic language
Bound morpheme
Isolating language
Linguistic typology
Morphological derivation
Morphology (linguistics)
References
External links
SIL: What is a morphological process?
SIL: What is derivation?
SIL: Comparison of inflection and derivation
Lexicon of Linguistics: Inflection, Derivation
Lexicon of Linguistics: Base, Stem, Root
, chapter 4 of Halvor Eifring & Rolf Theil: Linguistics for Students of Asian and African Languages
eo:Lingva tipologio#Sintezaj lingvoj