Morphological typology

The morphological typology is a system used to classify languages created by the brothers Friedrich and August von Schlegel.

Analytical languages

In this type of language, there is hardly any morphological derivation. Word order is very important in conveying the meaning and syntactic relationship of words. The radical remains solitary and is not modified.

Among others, some analytical languages are Chinese and Vietnamese.

Synthetic languages

Agglutinative synthetic tongues

These languages have some morphological complexity, but the morphemes (structural elements) can always be clearly separated. Although the stem is modified, they remain unchanged in the sense that the modification is done by affixes that are added to the stem. The most frequently used affixes are suffixes. They are added depending on the function of the word. Word order is somewhat less important than in analytic languages. This is because the suffixes add useful information for figuring out the syntactic role of the word.

Some examples of an agglutinative language are Korean, Turkish, and Japanese.

Fusing synthetic languages

Fusing languages are the most morphologically complex languages of the three types. Often, you cannot separate the morphemes from the lexeme or stem. Sometimes the lexeme cannot be distinguished from the affixes. The order of the words is not important at all, since most or all of the information of the syntactic structure is revealed by means of the morphology of the words. That is, the order of the phrases does not alter the meaning of the sentence.

Some examples of synthetic languages are Latin and Anglo-Saxon.

Polysynthetic languages

At the beginning of the 20th century, A. F. Pott studied languages that the von Schlegels did not know, and added a fourth category, polysynthetic languages.

It is a more advanced form of synthetic languages. The morphology of these languages is extremely complex. They usually incorporate many elements into one word or phrase. All the terms tend to merge with the verbal root.

Many Amerindian languages are polysynthetic. Inuktitut is an example of these, and a specific example is the phrase: tavvakiqutiqarpiit which might try to translate something like "Do you have any tobacco for sale?"