Talk:Isolating language

message: Of the hundreds of Wikipedia articles I have read, this is by far the most difficult to understand. Only a linguist would have any hope of comprehending it. A typical Wikipedia reader like me has no hope. Ronstew 03:13, 2 December 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Perhaps illustrations in English-based pidgins, which (I gather) are essentially isolating, would make it more accessible. —Tamfang (talk) 19:08, 2 May 2009 (UTC)
thread_title: Criticism

message: Most words are only one morpheme, but its common to derive new words from roots.  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 151.201.149.46 (talk) 23:03, 21 November 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: Affixes in Khmer changes the class of words or intensify an action.  It does not carry any grammatical information like plurality.  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 151.201.149.150 (talk) 23:05, 21 May 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  Khmer isn't a great example of an isolating language 

message: Isn't the current example of Chinese slightly odd? "明天我的朋友会为我一个蛋糕": 会 as "will" is redundant as the time of the action has already been specified, and I believe 为 as "for" is a little strange for this sentence. Wouldn't something like "明天我的朋友给我做一个蛋糕" be a better construction? 213.100.32.24 (talk) 08:28, 29 April 2009 (UTC)
thread_title: Chinese

message: I came here as a redirect from "analytic language". I'm wondering if that redirect is appropriate, since this article is about an extreme case of analytic languages, and assumes that the reader knows what analytic languages are. Is there a reason that "analytic language" can't have its own article? If there is, then maybe the lead should be reworked so that it handles those readers who come through the analytic redirect. If not, then maybe analytic should be branched off into its own article. (I'd do this myself... except I know nothing about the topic! Just thought I'd bring it to the attention of more knowledgeable editors.) – DroEsperanto(t / c) 01:57, 27 July 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  Analytic redirect 

message: I find the Burmese examples do not show Burmese script, no matter which encoding I choose for viewing the article.  Since I have many more than the average number of East Asian languages and fonts installed on my PC, I expect this problem would be widespread.  Therefore it would be desirable if somebody with access to the correct fonts and characters could make a graphic version of the text, for display for (I suspect) the majority of readers.
yoyo (talk) 17:07, 26 January 2010 (UTC)
thread_title:  Burmese examples 

message: Is "birthday" really only one morpheme, even though it is a compound word? Also, what about English words like "anti-conservationist" composed of multiple semantic parts? I'm not doubting the linguistics here, I'm just pointing out questions that occur to a non-linguist like me and that don't seem to be addressed here.
- TheFriendlyGod  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 74.88.39.41 (talk) 15:58, 9 May 2010 (UTC)
thread_title:  English 

message: From the Analytical Languages section: Mandarin Chinese has, e.g., "I go to store today.", "I go to store tomorrow.", "I go to store yesterday."
This would be better written "Today, I go to store.", "Tomorrow, I go to store.", Yesterday I go to store." It sounds very awkward to move these kinds of time-words to the back as we often do in English. They should be in front. There are other examples given with this kind of word order in other sections of this article.
If this is noticable to me, with my broken Madarin and mere 12 credit hours in Linguistics, it must be irritating to those with real skills.  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 68.99.174.26 (talk) 06:18, 10 March 2012 (UTC)
replies: text: Are you joking? 178.39.122.125 (talk) 03:41, 29 September 2016 (UTC)
replies: text: Yeah, I thought the OP was doing a transliteration. Can someone who speaks Mandarin help out? --Bluejay Young (talk) 08:47, 1 October 2016 (UTC)
thread_title:  Error in Mandarin 

message: This article used language that clearly identified languages as being in such and such category, even though linguists today stress that these are more like continuous axes: "[s]imilarly, in the synthetic language Russian, [...]", "[a]nalytic languages are especially common in China and Southeast Asia, where examples include Vietnamese". I've changed the article to make isolation seem more like a relative axis. The entire section of alleged examples of isolating languages were all just about highly analytic languages. This section was written while grossly confusing what isolation is with what analysis is.
On the other hand, I think there is enough on analytic languages to merit an article. In fact, the article on isolation as it is stands with no references whatsoever—I'll add some later. Why were both articles merged to begin with? Perhaps the one(s) who carried it out were simply confused about what both concepts are about?--Serafín33 (talk) 09:31, 22 April 2013 (UTC)
thread_title: Scalar categories, new article on analytic languages

message: I read it, and when you follow a couple of the links and briefly read over them, it really isn't hard to understand. When I came up against the word "morpheme", I simply clicked the link, read over it briefly, and was back here in a second.  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 99.35.197.10 (talk) 03:10, 5 January 2014 (UTC)
thread_title:  Not that bad, actually. 

message: The Dutch version of this article states that isolating languages are usually also tonal languages, the tones serving to distinguish between what would otherwise be homophones - examples being Vietnamese, Thai and the Chinese languages. I don't know if this is true, but if so I reckon it would be worth mentioning here. If not, the Dutch version (and possibly some other language versions?) should presumably be corrected.213.127.210.95 (talk) 17:53, 3 December 2016 (UTC)
thread_title:  Relationship with tonal languages 

message: "On average, words in English have a morpheme per word ratio substantially greater than one." -- Is English really a good example here? Among Indo-European languages at least, I'd expect English to be on the low end of morpheme per word ratios considering its relative lack of inflections. Daß Wölf 07:17, 30 August 2019 (UTC)
thread_title:  Example in Explanation section 

message: The image at the bottom of the page claims that the white spots are isolating languages. However, Tagalog is also coloured white even though I have seen it described as agglutinative, in fact, most non-Oceanic Austronesian languages are agglutinative, based on what I have read. Also, WALS is claiming that Tagalog has 'little affixing' and yet Wikipedia's own article on Tagalog grammar clearly shows that this is wrong. -MToumbola (talk) 12:38, 1 December 2019 (UTC)
thread_title:  Image 

message: The article claims that Igbo is an isolating language, even though the Igbo verb is shown to be heavily inflected in pretty much every grammar that I have come across. Does anyone have a source for the claim that Igbo is isolating?  — Preceding unsigned comment added by Umu igbo (talk • contribs) 01:31, 20 April 2022 (UTC)
thread_title:  Igbo is isolating? 

message: I added more sources (and an examples list section) to hopefully facilitate the expansion of this page. I would love some help in developing it and also making it easier to read. I'm no expert either, but hopefully the sources provided are useful to anyone wanting to delve into this and make it better. Edenaviv5 (talk) 15:03, 22 March 2023 (UTC)
thread_title:  Added sources, needs more revision 

message: — Assignment last updated by Stutz23 (talk) 18:34, 24 March 2024 (UTC)
thread_title: Wiki Education assignment: Linguistics in the Digital Age