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Morphological typology was developed by brothers Friedrich and August von Schlegel. It is a classification system for languages. The scale below is continuous and relative. It is not absolute. You can't necessarily say that a language is analytic or synthetic, but you can say that it is more synthetic than Chinese but less synthetic than Korean.
Analytic languagesIn analytic languages, there is generally little if any morphological changes. Grammatical changes are indicated by word order, or by bringing in additional words. Words are usually meaningless on thier own, or they just indicate the root concept. In these languages' grammars, context and syntax are more important than morphology. Analytic languages include Chinese and Vietnamese. Synthetic languagesSynthetic languages tend to make lots of changes to words by adding morphemes. The morphemes might or might not be distinguishable from the root. Word order is less important, as it is the morphemes that give the meaning of the words in the sentence. In addition, there tends to be plenty of concordance (cross-reference between different parts of the sentence, agreement). In synthetic languages' grammars, morphology tends to about as important as context and syntax. The two general subtypes of synthetic languages are agglutinative and inflected. Originally, inflected was synonymous with synthetic, with agglutinative being a seperate category. In modern classification schemes, these are considered subtypes of synthetic languages. Russian is an example of a synthetic language. Agglutinative languagesIn these languages the morphemes (structural elements) are always clearly detachable; that is, the root words are modified, but the elements can clearly be taken apart from the original word(s). Even though the root words are modified, they stay the same in that it is only affixes that are added to the root, most commonly added affixes are suffixes. They are added depending on the function of the word in the sentence. Word order is slightly less important than it was in analytic languages. This is because the word endings tell you the role of the words structurally. Agglutinative languages include Korean, Turkish and Japanese. Inflected languagesInflected languages differ from agglutinative languages in that in these languages, the morphemes are not readily distinguishable from the root; they are "squished" together so that each affix or inflection has more than one meaning. A different inflection is necessary to express a similar but subtly different meaning. An example of an inflected language would be Latin. Polysynthetic languagesIn the early 20th Century, A.F. Pott studied other languages that were not available to the von Schlegels, and added a third category: Polysynthetic languages. These languages are morphologically extremely complex. They often incorporate many elements into one word or phrase. All elements tend to be fused with the verb stem. Generally, morphology is more important than context and syntax. Many of the Amerindian languages are polysynthetic. Inuktitut is one example, and one specific example is the phrase: tavvakiqutiqarpiit which roughly translates to "Do you have any tobacco for sale?" Each of the types above are ideals that do not exist. All languages are mixed in form, but generally they fit best into one category better than others. For example, English verbs distinguish the third person singular indicative from the rest of the present tense (synthetic) but only distinguishes the function of nouns in sentences using word order (analytic). |
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