Talk:Synthetic language

message: There are strong arguments that English isn't a creole, and no consensus that it is (http://www.zompist.com/lang18.html#20 - Sci.lang FAQ). There are probably better examples of creoles with reduced inflections, more suitable for this page. Carandol 12:16, 23 Sep 2004 (UTC)
thread_title: English not creole

message: I have corrected the definition previously given, but in my opinion, the definition I have given is somewhat rough and ready - it requires someone more well-versed in linguistics to complete the transformation into a proper encyclopedia entry. --firstfox 12:06, 1 Dec 2004 (UTC)
thread_title: correction

message: See my discussion @ Inflection: How is Inflection being confused with Synthesis?
&
some suggested reference sites: links.
: peace - 
:: - Ish ishwar 19:52, 3 Dec 2004 (UTC)
thread_title: confusion: synthesis & inflection

message: Could knowledgeable speakers of the example languages please expand on the examples under the headings Rather synthetic, Very synthetic, and Polysynthetic?  It would be better to have a morpheme-by-morpheme gloss as well as the idiomatic translation into English. --Jim Henry | Talk 17:56, 2 August 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Glosses, please? 

message: I'm only a beginner in Japanese, but it appears to me that the hiragana transcription differs from the given roumaji example;
where the roumaji reads Watashitachi ni (私たしたちに), the hiragana displays Watachi ni (私たちに). TWB 86.138.73.142 11:27, 22 September 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: In fact the latter is correct and the former is wrong; 私 alone reads watashi. I'm going to remove the kanji/kana altogether; they serve no purpose at all for this topic. —Pablo D. Flores (Talk) 11:59, 22 September 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Japanese text typo - Rather Synthetic 

message: My interest in the difference between inflected and polysynthetic is piqued.  I am also wondering what it is that makes that Mohawk word a word ... is the speed at which it is spoken?  Could it not stand alone as a sentence/clause?  It's only clear that it's word to me because there aren't any spaces in it, which seems like a trivial typographical thing.  I think the reader could benefit from a clearer definition of "word".  Great article. Boris B 09:05, 8 January 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  More About Mohawk 

message: I'd be interested to see a rating of "the degree to which a language is synthetic." I'm new to linguistics; has anyone come across anything like that? Maybe an estimate of morpheme-to-word ratio in a given language, given typical usage? I understand there would be a lot of variability within a single language (e.g. the difference between formal and informal speech), among other problems, but I'm just throwing some ideas out there. Kevrhodes 00:00, 27 August 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Morpheme-to-word ratios 

message: as for the examples, it would be good that someone who knows (not my case) classed languages with the largest number of speakers or spoken in different continents, such as Chinese, Spanish or Portuguese, for demonstrative purposes.
as for Spanish, being myself a native speaker (yet not linguist) I'd say that it is rather analytic or, in any case, a rather isolating. This is maybe worth the note, but I'd rather have someone who really knows about how to put it in correct terms. Mountolive  group using a loop of another pop group 21:31, 11 June 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  examples 

message: I can follow the English, Japanese and Finnish examples, but I feel I really need a bit of help with the others. And I don't think I'm the only one for whom these examples are completely meaningless, so I think these are in need of syntax trees. Shinobu (talk) 13:17, 11 September 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  Degrees of synthesis - syntax trees please? 

message: Shouldnt there be short introductions of those in the article? arent they part of syntethic aswell? Luka Jačov (talk) 17:12, 10 November 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: This definitely needs clarification!  Currently, Agglutinative language and Fusional language claim to be subsets of "synthetic language", but the intro to this article says these classifications are independent. -- Beland (talk) 19:29, 11 January 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  Polysynthetic, Fusional, Agglunative 

message: Why is the Turkish example "Afyonkarahisarlılaştıramayabileceklerimizden misiniz" amongst the relational synthesis' examples, when it has clearly synthesized a whole sentence to one word? Shouldn't it be an example for polysynthesis? -- 189.18.128.108 (talk) 22:18, 27 April 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  Polysynthetic vs. Relational synthesis 

message: Is this example appropriate? The text says "each word is one morpheme", which is not true. Words like 生日 are clearly bimorphemic (birth-day), and in fact most nouns in Chinese are compound words like this. Jerry Packard's 2000 book The Morphology of Chinese says a lot about this. Should the example be changed, or at least should the explanatory text be modified? rʨanaɢ talk/contribs 21:42, 27 May 2009 (UTC)
replies: text: I thought the same thing. I don't see how 生日 is any less synthetic than birthday. LeeWilson (talk) 14:30, 3 February 2010 (UTC)

text: In fact, I find it hard to believe any language is strictly isolating. It would mean that every single word in the entire language was composed of a single morpheme each. LeeWilson (talk) 14:33, 3 February 2010 (UTC)
thread_title:  Chinese example for "strictly isolating" 

message: It could help to clear this up a little bit. If I've understood correctly, an example of an Oligosynthetic language would be Newspeak, described by George Orwell in 1984  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 93.144.16.237 (talk) 14:25, 17 June 2009 (UTC)
replies: text: Eahum, the trouble with Newspeak is that it is a fictional language that isn't described good enought to characterize it, so we should either keep to principle, or exemplify with an existing spoken language. An oligosynthetic language would use a comparatively small set of independent root words, and to compensate for the lack of independent meanings, use composition to create a large vocabulary. I believe this is the correct understanding of "oligosynthesis". Rursus dixit. (mbork3!) 13:29, 28 March 2010 (UTC)
thread_title:  Oligosynthesis 

message: There is also an entirely-different meaning of "synthetic language". 
Think of Esperanto, Interlingua, etc.
See: constructed language.
98.81.1.45 (talk) 17:03, 20 August 2010 (UTC)
thread_title:  There is also an entirely-different meaning of "synthetic language". -- 

message: This sentence isn't clear at all to me. 
:"with" and "link" (as in link of a chain) form a derivation that is the German word for "member"; similarly, "completion", "collect" and "noun" form a derivation that means "meeting", with both "ver-" and "-ung" being bound morphemes
Can the author please explain where the "with" and "link" came from? -TMI
German word for "member" is Mitglied, which comes from mit ("with") and Glied ("link of a chain"), at least according to the author, because I didn't find any evidence on that etymology. It's very poorly written.  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 87.204.156.74 (talk) 17:19, 24 August 2016 (UTC)
thread_title:  Forms of synthesis: Derivational Synthesis 

message: An editor tried to translate the Hungarian example into what he thinks is English by using indesecretable. I cannot parse this alleged word. I looked for it in a couple of dictionaries. Google provides 191 hits -- this article and 190 mirrors of it. No encyclopedia should be in the business of introducing new words (that would be OR). Someone, please fix this abomination. 71.178.95.236 (talk) 22:08, 12 December 2013 (UTC)
thread_title:  Indesecretable 

message: The hungarian example is not representative to the language. We here in hungary use that word (megszentségteleníthetetlenségeskedéseitekért) as a joke and I do not know a single hungarian word of similar length that is practical. Besides, I, and probably others too, did not understood that word the first time we have heard it. Consider at least noting that this is a joke-word, since maybe the examples of other languages are more serious and representative.  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 46.249.133.113 (talk) 07:21, 1 February 2014 (UTC)
thread_title:  Degress of synthesis / Very synthetic / Hungarian 

message: The Greek example given, υπερχοληστερολαιμία, is a borrowing of a compound constructed in international scientific terminology. That doesn't make it any less of a Greek word, however, I don't think it's a good example of the synthetic nature of Greek, since exactly the same word (hypercholesterolemia) is found in English, French, etc. I think it would be better to find a compound constructed within Greek. --Macrakis (talk) 14:43, 19 May 2015 (UTC)
replies: text: I will change example to προπαροξυτόνησις (proparoxytonisis), whose constituent morphemes are προ-παρ-οξυ-τόν-ησις, and it's actually attested in a Byzantine author. --Macrakis (talk) 22:10, 20 May 2015 (UTC)
thread_title: Greek example

message: Can someone add a normal gloss to the given examples? For now it's a pseudo-glossy English translation that makes no sense.
For instance:
przystanek => "beside-stand-little"
This example suggests that 'ek means little, which is ridiculous, because someone may think that ek is an actual weird meaning little, while it's only a diminutive suffix.
Also, why are some words in italics, some in quotation marks, some divided into morphemes by hyphens, some not?  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 87.204.156.74 (talk) 16:57, 24 August 2016 (UTC)
thread_title:  Improvements needed 

message: Child labor law is quite different from antidisestablishmentarianism in that it's made up of free morphemes (also known as lexemes, or – much more plainly – words). Child, labor, and law are each a lexeme in themselves. Anti-, dis-, -ment, -arian, and -ism are all bound morphemes: they don't work as words themselves. The fact that child labor law is sometimes works like a single word is highly context-specific, and probably not a good example  here.
"Morphemes which _may_ occur alone are FREE FORMS; morphemes which may not occur alone are BOUND FORMS. [emphasis and capitalisation as in original]"Elson, Benjamin F. (Benjamin Franklin), 1921-, Velma Pickett, and Summer Institute of Linguistics. Beginning Morphology-syntax. [1st. ed.] Santa Ana, Calif.: Summer Institute of Linguistics, 1960. pp. 7. Zach Beauvais (talk) 15:18, 25 October 2019 (UTC)
replies: text: If English compounds were written as single word like in other Germanic languages, it would be childlaborlaw, comparable to the german translation Kinderarbeitsgesetz. Compound words are a common feature of Germanic languages. --Universal-Interessierterde (talk (de)) 10:43, 21 March 2023 (UTC)
thread_title:  Child Labor Law example 

message: The template says the distinction is unclear, but I think the article as it currently stands defines the difference very clearly: derivational synthesis is synthesis of free morphemes, and relational synthesis is synthesis by bound morphemes. As other users have pointed out, some of the examples are of questionable quality, but that's a separate issue. Can we remove this tag? --68.238.247.27 (talk) 04:39, 9 March 2018 (UTC)
thread_title:  Validity of "confusing or unclear" template w/r/t derivational vs relational synthesis 

message: In Burmese,  there are endings for words depending on their grammatical case. For example, the dative ending is အား. As there are such endings word-order does not alter the meaning. SOV word order is not the only order. OSV is also accepted at the same level. Therefore, Burmese is not a Analytic language. For more information refer to the work of Judson on Burmese Grammar. H.Myoe Khant (talk) 02:09, 13 August 2018 (UTC)
thread_title:  Burmese as a synthetic language. 

message: After the latest changes in the lead, it contains what I see as a very serious mistake in describing fusional and agglutinating languages. Sentences like these are wrong: ... adding affixes (characteristic for fusional languages, ...); Combining two or more morphemes into one word is used in agglutinating languages. Of course adding affixes is nothing but a form of combining morphemes, and this is not what separates fusional languages from agglutinating ones: the difference is that in fusional languages the morphemes often represent several grammatical traits at once, rather than just one per morpheme. 
I might be missing other mistakes, and for this reason I'd like to hear other points of view before editing the page. Jotamar (talk) 22:39, 4 October 2023 (UTC)
replies: text: By latest changes, I mean mostly those by  around August the 20th. --Jotamar (talk) 21:28, 5 October 2023 (UTC)
replies: text: With no reply in months, I've decided to revert to the version before the editions at issue. --Jotamar (talk) 00:16, 16 January 2024 (UTC)
thread_title:  Fusional and agglutinating languages