Synthetic tongue

In linguistic typology, synthetic language is a language that has a large number of morphemes per word. Whereas an isolating language is a language in which almost every word is monomorphemic. While strictly the synthetic/isolating distinction refers to the number of morphemes per word, that distinction tends to be correlated with the inflectional/analytic distinction: inflectional languages tend to be synthetic and analytic languages (en:Analytic language) tend to be insulators. For this reason, synthetic and inflectional are sometimes used synonymously, and insulator and analytic as synonyms.

The difference between synthetic and analytical languages is based on morpheme counting and is, in principle, different from other classifications that analyze how morphemes are combined, such as, for example, the classification that divides languages into isolators, fusions, binders, or polysynthetics. Although it is true that analytic languages tend to be isolating, while fusion and agglutinative languages tend to be synthetic, in certain cases it is convenient to keep both types of classification separate.

Synthetic versus insulating tongues

Synthetic languages are often contrasted with isolating languages. However, it is more rigorous to conceive that the property of being synthetic is a continuum that goes from strictly isolating languages (a single morpheme per word) at one end, to polysynthetic languages (in which a single word can itself be a single morpheme). sentence with information of a complex event in which the action, the subject, the object, etc. are indicated in a single word) at the other end. Most synthetic languages tend to fall somewhere in the middle of these two extreme cases.

Terminology

Linguists have called languages that have grammatical functions within words "synthetic." This idea originated with the book Language, published by Edward Sapir in 1921 (Schwegler, xi). Sapir called "analytic" languages that use other words (prepositions, auxiliaries) to indicate grammatical functions. He also refers to synthetic languages as inflectional languages, which refers to the inflection required to distinguish between different forms of words. In addition to naming the analytic languages proper, they are called isolating languages, which refers to the idea that each word makes sense on its own (and the non-word elements of a synthetic language do not necessarily make sense when separated). of the root) (Comrie, 43).

The dichotomy introduced by Sapir was reformed in 1954 by Joseph Greenberg, who introduced the morpheme as a unit to derive the degree of syntheticity. The formula he used is the ratio of morphemes per word to create a syntheticity index (Schwegler, xii).

These distinctions are still used but in different senses: the process of linguistic change alters the language and sometimes creates it as more analytical or more synthetic. If we think of the concept of syntheticity as an axis, the diachronic evolution of the language will move the position of the language on the axis from one place to another (Schwegler, 47). That is, that over time, a speech unit will change from the analytical direction to the synthetic direction or vice versa.

There are different degrees of syntheticity, a language can exhibit different synthetic characteristics.

Examples

Synthetic languages are very common. Among the best known are naturally the Indo-European languages, such as Greek, Latin, German, Russian and other languages from other places, such as the Dravidian languages, and the American languages, such as Navajo, Nahuatl, Mohawk or Quechua. English is an analytical language, with a residual system of morphological change.

Types of syntheticity

Both synthetic languages and analytic languages can form new expressions and lexical forms in a variety of ways. All languages have as a mechanism for the formation of new words both the use of syntactic constructions, as well as composition (in addition to lexical loan processes). Highly synthetic languages also have two types of word formation that analytic languages do not:

• bending
• derivation

Synthetic derivation

What is called derivation refers to the process of creating words by joining already existing morphemes. In the derivation, affixes are added to the root or it undergoes some type of mutation. Traditionally, the name derivation has been reserved to refer to word formation processes that change either the syntactic type of the word (nominalizers, verbalizers, etc.) as well as the type of referent (clock > watchmaker). The derivation usually involves significant changes in meaning, in addition to changes in the grammatical category of the word. From a purely morphological point of view, the morphemes that make the derivation are usually those that are closest to the root, and the inflectional morphemes are those that are furthest from the root according to the scheme:

[chuckles][chuckles]LEXEMA+DERIV]+FLEX]{displaystyle [{mbox{LEXEMA}}}+{mbox{DERIV}}]+{mbox{FLEX}}},}

Synthetic Flex

Inflection is similar, except that here there is no change of grammatical category and the affixes and mutations suffered by the word are intended to express a relationship of grammatical type, and in general there is no change in the type of referent to which the word refers to. A typical case of bending is the morphological case

(Latin): dominus 'sir, master' in front of dominī 'of the lord, of the master'

In this example, the inflection of Latin words, the ending -us marks the nominative case that usually designates the subject of a sentence, while the ending -ī marks the genitive case that usually serves to express the function of the possession complement (Comparán Rizo, 12).

Degree of syntheticity

There are completely synthetic languages and there are fairly synthetic or slightly synthetic languages that constitute a continuum of syntheticity.

Strictly isolating/analytical languages

(no elements of a synthetic language/analytic language):

• Mandarin (of the Chinese):

tā / qù / zhōngguó / xué / zhōngguó / huà

3aPER /ir/China/aprender/China/pintar

'He/she went to China to learn Chinese painting' (Wheeldon, 228)

In (written) Chinese, each morpheme also has its own character, although some words may use two Chinese characters.

Slightly insulating languages

(few, but some, examples of syntheticity):

• English:

She called me and told me about it over the phone.

She/had called/me/and/had/said/me/about/this/referring/pron demos 3rd person/telephone

'She called me and told me on the phone.'

In the English language, there are not many synthetic words, but there are morphemes, especially with regard to verbs, that indicate tense, for example, -ed in called (past tense).

Slightly inflected tongues

• Turkish:

evlerimizde (ev-ler-im-iz-de)

'in our houses' (Rogers, 37)

(ev 'house', -Toler. plural, -im 1.a person, - plural person, - 'in'

There are many morphemes in a single word in slightly inflected languages.

Very inflectional languages

Finnish: kahvinjuojia (Creutz and Lindén, 7) “coffee drinkers"

“kahvi” (coffee)-“n” (indicates the genitive grammatical function)-“juo” (from “juoda”=to drink)-“jia” (each letter indicates some grammatical function—“j" for the verb, "i" to indicate plural and "a" to indicate the partitive grammatical function)

There are many morphemes within a single word in synthetic languages.

Polysynthetic languages

• Nahuatl de Michoacán (oto-aztec language):

an-nih-čiwa-lti-k (Sischo, 354)

'You forced me to do it.

(an (2nd) PL.SUJ- Nih (1.a SG.OBJ- čiwa (doing) lti (causative) - k (perfect)

In this example, there are many morphemes within a single word. In polysynthetic languages, there is more syntheticity than is normal (Schwegler, 14).

Oligosynthetic tongues

There are no known examples. This category is purely theoretical to distinguish between strictly synthetic languages with quite few morphemes (Whorf, 25).

Syntheticity changes

The development of a language gradually changes some forms of the language from synthetic forms to more analytical forms or from analytic forms to more synthetic forms. In order to become more analytical, a language will, in general, reduce its morphemic and lexemic quantity. Inflections are not as important in creating the semantic sense of the word, but as it becomes more analytic, a language also adds syntactic rules for it. The simplification of reducing the inflectional system results in a more complex syntactic system (Polikárpov). This type of linguistic change (shifting to a more analytical degree) is evident in the diachronic evolution of many modern languages. Otto Jespersen describes this process (change from a synthetic language to a more analytical language) as language decomposition (Jespersen, 421). You can see this process in the evolution from Latin to Spanish. For example:

(Latin) amīcī

'of the friend' (Pharies, 102)

In this example, the preposition is used in Spanish to indicate the grammatical form, in this example, the adjective. In Latin, vowel inflection serves this grammatical function.

On the other hand, a language can become more synthetic also through modes of linguistic change. There aren't that many examples of this kind of change, but some scholars put forward the idea that parsing and synthesizing are both different ways of simplifying a language. Analytic languages are more simplified in the sense of not having as many vowels or the complex system of differential inflection. But synthetic languages are more simplified in the sense that one can express in one word what requires a whole sentence in another analytical language.

In the Castilian language of the medieval period, the future tense and the conditional tense were expressed by an analytical form, in which isolated words made sense. An example would be the following:

♪ I told you I did ♪

Over time, this construction was simplified into a compound form that is now the synthetic form of the future tense.

I told you. ▪ I'll tell you.

It is still a form consisting of three words, but count+é, the verb, and the auxiliary have joined together and cannot be separated to make a sentence (Penny, 152). The interesting thing about this change in the Spanish language is that it is now becoming more analytical. For example:

I'll count instead of saying I'll count (Silva-Corvalan, 5)

Then, the evolution of this tense has proceeded as follows:

count (then) ▪ I'll tell you. ▪ I'll tell you.

Essentially it changed from two words to one (synthesis) and then from one word to three (analysis).