A synthetic language uses
inflection
In linguistic morphology, inflection (or inflexion) is a process of word formation in which a word is modified to express different grammatical categories such as tense, case, voice, aspect, person, number, gender, mood, animacy, and ...
or
agglutination
In linguistics, agglutination is a morphological process in which words are formed by stringing together morphemes, each of which corresponds to a single syntactic feature. Languages that use agglutination widely are called agglutinative la ...
to express
syntactic relationships within a sentence. Inflection is the addition of
morphemes to a root word that assigns grammatical property to that word, while agglutination is the combination of two or more morphemes into one word. The information added by morphemes can include indications of a word's grammatical category, such as whether a word is the subject or object in the sentence.
Morphology can be either relational or derivational.
While a derivational morpheme changes the
lexical categories
In grammar, a part of speech or part-of-speech (abbreviated as POS or PoS, also known as word class or grammatical category) is a category of words (or, more generally, of lexical items) that have similar grammatical properties. Words that are assi ...
of words, an inflectional morpheme does not. In the first example below, the adjective ''fast'' followed by the suffix ''-er'' yields ''faster'', which is still an adjective. However, the verb ''teach'' followed by the suffix ''-er'' yields ''teacher'', which is a noun. The first case is an example of inflection and the latter derivation.
* ''fast'' (adjective, positive) vs. ''faster'' (adjective, comparative)
* ''teach'' (verb) vs. ''teacher'' (noun)
In synthetic languages, there is a higher morpheme-to-word ratio than in
analytic languages. Analytic languages have a lower morpheme-to-word ratio, higher use of
auxiliary verbs, and greater reliance on
word order
In linguistics, word order (also known as linear order) is the order of the syntactic constituents of a language. Word order typology studies it from a cross-linguistic perspective, and examines how different languages employ different orders. C ...
to convey grammatical information. The two subtypes of synthetic languages are
agglutinating languages and
fusional languages. These can be further divided into
polysynthetic language
In linguistic typology, polysynthetic languages, formerly holophrastic languages, are highly synthetic languages, i.e. languages in which words are composed of many morphemes (word parts that have independent meaning but may or may not be able ...
s (most polysynthetic languages are agglutinative, although Navajo and other Athabaskan languages are often classified as fusional) and
oligosynthetic languages.
Forms of synthesis
Language
Language is a structured system of communication. The structure of a language is its grammar and the free components are its vocabulary. Languages are the primary means by which humans communicate, and may be conveyed through a variety of ...
exhibits synthesis in two ways:
derivational and relational morphology. These methods of synthesis refer to the ways in which morphemes, the smallest grammatical units in a language, are bound together. Derivational and relational morphology represent opposite ends of a spectrum; that is, a single word in a given language may exhibit varying degrees of both of them simultaneously. Similarly, some words may have derivational morphology while others have relational morphology. Some linguists, however, consider relational morphology to be a type of derivational morphology, which may complicate the classification.
Derivational synthesis
In derivational synthesis, morphemes of different types (
noun
A noun () is a word that generally functions as the name of a specific object or set of objects, such as living creatures, places, actions, qualities, states of existence, or ideas.Example nouns for:
* Living creatures (including people, alive, ...
s,
verbs,
affix
In linguistics, an affix is a morpheme that is attached to a word stem to form a new word or word form. Affixes may be derivational, like English ''-ness'' and ''pre-'', or inflectional, like English plural ''-s'' and past tense ''-ed''. They ...
es, etc.) are joined to create new words. That is, in general, the morphemes being combined are more concrete units of meaning.
The morphemes being synthesized in the following examples either belong to a particular grammatical class – such as
adjective
In linguistics, an adjective ( abbreviated ) is a word that generally modifies a noun or noun phrase or describes its referent. Its semantic role is to change information given by the noun.
Traditionally, adjectives were considered one of the ...
s, nouns, or
prepositions – or are affixes that usually have a single form and meaning:
*
German
German(s) may refer to:
* Germany (of or related to)
**Germania (historical use)
* Germans, citizens of Germany, people of German ancestry, or native speakers of the German language
** For citizens of Germany, see also German nationality law
**Ge ...
::* This word demonstrates the hierarchical construction of synthetically derived words:
:::# "members of
hesupervisory board" + "meeting"
:::## "supervisory board" + ''s'' (''
Fugen-s'') + "members"
:::### "supervision" + ''s'' + "council, board"
:::#### "on, up" + "sight"
:::### "member" + plural
:::#### "co-" + "element, constituent part"
:::## (a verb prefix of variable meaning) + "to gather" + present participle
:::*, , , , and are all
bound morphemes.
*
Greek
*
Polish
*
English
English usually refers to:
* English language
* English people
English may also refer to:
Peoples, culture, and language
* ''English'', an adjective for something of, from, or related to England
** English national ...
:* English word chains such as ''child labour law'' may count as well, because it is merely an orthographic convention to write them as isolated words. Grammatically and phonetically they behave like one word (stress on the first syllable, plural morpheme at the end).
*
Russian
*
Malayalam
Malayalam (; , ) is a Dravidian language spoken in the Indian state of Kerala and the union territories of Lakshadweep and Puducherry ( Mahé district) by the Malayali people. It is one of 22 scheduled languages of India. Malayalam wa ...
** ()
***"such/so + not + has + been + when + occasions + all + exclusively"
***"on all such occasions when it has been not so"
*
Persian
*
Ukrainian
Ukrainian may refer to:
* Something of, from, or related to Ukraine
* Something relating to Ukrainians, an East Slavic people from Eastern Europe
* Something relating to demographics of Ukraine in terms of demography and population of Ukraine
* So ...
* international
classical compounds based on Greek and Latin
:::* alternately, cholesterol can be read as
chole- + () +
-ol, as in "bile + solid + [alcohol suffix]", or "the solid alcohol present in bile".
Relational synthesis
In relational synthesis,
root words are joined to
bound morphemes to show grammatical function. In other words, it involves the combination of more abstract units of meaning than derivational synthesis.
In the following examples note that many of the morphemes are related to
voice (e.g. passive voice), whether a word is in the
subject or
object
Object may refer to:
General meanings
* Object (philosophy), a thing, being, or concept
** Object (abstract), an object which does not exist at any particular time or place
** Physical object, an identifiable collection of matter
* Goal, an ...
of the sentence,
possession,
plural
The plural (sometimes list of glossing abbreviations, abbreviated pl., pl, or ), in many languages, is one of the values of the grammatical number, grammatical category of number. The plural of a noun typically denotes a quantity greater than the ...
ity, or other abstract distinctions in a language:
*
Italian
*
Spanish
*
Nahuatl
*
Latin
Latin (, or , ) is a classical language belonging to the Italic languages, Italic branch of the Indo-European languages. Latin was originally a dialect spoken in the lower Tiber area (then known as Latium) around present-day Rome, but through ...
*
Albanian
**
***"give + to me + it[singular] + you[plural] + [
imperative mood
The imperative mood is a grammatical mood that forms a command or request.
The imperative mood is used to demand or require that an action be performed. It is usually found only in the present tense, second person. To form the imperative mood, ...
]"
***'You, give it to me'
*
Japanese
*
Finnish
*
Hungarian
*
Turkish
*
Georgian
**The word describes the whole sentence that incorporates tense, subject, object, relation between them, direction of the action, conditional and causative markers etc.
Types of synthetic languages
Agglutinating languages
Agglutinating languages have a high rate of agglutination in their words and sentences, meaning that the morphological construction of words consists of distinct morphemes that usually carry a single unique meaning. These morphemes tend to look the same no matter what word they are in, so it is easy to separate a word into its individual morphemes.
Note that morphemes may be bound (that is, they must be attached to a word to have meaning, like affixes) or
free (they can stand alone and still have meaning).
*Swahili is an agglutinating language.
For example, distinct morphemes are used in the conjugation of verbs:
**Ni-na-soma: I-present-read or I am reading
**U-na-soma: you-present-read or you are reading
**A-na-soma: s/he-present-read or s/he is reading
Fusional languages
Fusional languages are similar to agglutinating languages in that they involve the combination of many distinct morphemes. However, morphemes in fusional languages are often assigned several different lexical meanings, and they tend to be fused together so that it is difficult to separate individual morphemes from one another.
Polysynthetic
Polysynthetic languages are considered the most synthetic of the three types because they combine multiple
stems as well as other morphemes into a single continuous word. These languages often turn nouns into verbs.
Many
Native Alaskan and other Native American languages are polysynthetic.
*Mohawk: Washakotya'tawitsherahetkvhta'se means "He ruined her dress" (strictly, 'He made the-thing-that-one-puts-on-one's body ugly for her'). This one inflected verb in a polysynthetic language expresses an idea that can only be conveyed using multiple words in a more analytic language such as English.
Oligosynthetic
Oligosynthetic languages are a theoretical notion created by
Benjamin Whorf. Such languages would be functionally synthetic, but make use of a very limited array of morphemes (perhaps just a few hundred). The concept of an oligosynthetic language type was proposed by Whorf to describe the
Native American language
Nahuatl, although he did not further pursue this idea. Though no natural language uses this process, it has found its use in the world of
constructed languages, in
auxlangs such as
aUI.
Synthetic and analytic languages
Synthetic languages combine (''synthesize'') multiple concepts into each word.
Analytic languages break up (''analyze'') concepts into separate words. These classifications comprise two ends of a spectrum along which different languages can be classified. The present-day
English
English usually refers to:
* English language
* English people
English may also refer to:
Peoples, culture, and language
* ''English'', an adjective for something of, from, or related to England
** English national ...
is seen as analytic, but it used to be fusional. Certain synthetic qualities (as in the inflection of verbs to show
tense) were retained.
The distinction is, therefore, a matter of degree. The most analytic languages consistently have one morpheme per word, while at the other extreme, in polysynthetic languages such as some
Native American languages a single inflected verb may contain as much information as an entire English sentence.
In order to demonstrate the nature of the analytic–synthetic–polysynthetic classification as a "continuum", some examples are shown below.
More analytic
*
Mandarin lacks
inflectional morphology almost entirely, and most words consist of either one- or two-syllable morphemes, especially due to the very numerous
compound words.
However, with rare exceptions, each syllable in Mandarin (corresponding to a single written character) represents a morpheme with an identifiable meaning, even if many of such morphemes are
bound. This gives rise to the
common misconception
Each entry on this list of common misconceptions is worded as a correction; the misconceptions themselves are implied rather than stated. These entries are concise summaries of the main subject articles, which can be consulted for more detail.
...
that Chinese consists exclusively of "words of one syllable". As the sentence above illustrates, however, even simple Chinese words such as ''míngtiān'' 'tomorrow' (''míng'' "next" + ''tīan'' "day") and ''péngyou'' 'friend' (a compound of ''péng'' and ''yǒu'', both of which mean 'friend') are synthetic compound words.
The Chinese language of the Classic works, and of
Confucius
Confucius ( ; zh, s=, p=Kǒng Fūzǐ, "Master Kǒng"; or commonly zh, s=, p=Kǒngzǐ, labels=no; – ) was a Chinese philosopher and politician of the Spring and Autumn period who is traditionally considered the paragon of Chinese sages. C ...
for example, is more strictly monosyllabic (and southern dialects to a certain extent): each character represents one word. The evolution of modern Mandarin Chinese was accompanied by a reduction in the total number of phonemes. Words which previously were phonetically distinct became homophones. Many disyllabic words in modern Mandarin are the result of joining two related words (such as péngyou, literally "friend-friend") in order to resolve the phonetic ambiguity. A similar process is observed in some English dialects. For instance, in the
Southern dialects of American English, it is not unusual for the short vowel sounds
�and
�to be indistinguishable before
nasal consonants
In phonetics, a nasal, also called a nasal occlusive or nasal stop in contrast with an oral stop or nasalized consonant, is an occlusive consonant produced with a lowered velum, allowing air to escape freely through the nose. The vast major ...
: thus the words "pen" and "pin" are homophones (see
pin-pen merger
The close and mid-height front vowels of English (vowels of ''i'' and ''e'' type) have undergone a variety of changes over time and often vary by dialect.
Developments involving long vowels
Until Great Vowel Shift
Middle English had a long ...
). In these dialects, the ambiguity is often resolved by using the compounds "ink-pen" and "stick-pin", in order to clarify which "p*n" is being discussed.
Rather analytic
*
English
English usually refers to:
* English language
* English people
English may also refer to:
Peoples, culture, and language
* ''English'', an adjective for something of, from, or related to England
** English national ...
:
**"He travelled by hovercraft on the sea" is largely isolating, but ''travelled'' (although it is possible to say "did travel" instead) and ''hovercraft'' each have two morphemes per word, the former being an example of relational synthesis (inflection), and the latter of compounding synthesis (a special case of derivation with another free morpheme instead of a bound one).
Rather synthetic
*
Japanese:
** means strictly literally, "To us, these photos of a child crying are things that are difficult to be shown", meaning 'We cannot bear being shown these photos of a child crying' in more idiomatic English. In the example, most words have more than one morpheme and some have up to five.
*
Hebrew
Hebrew (; ; ) is a Northwest Semitic language of the Afroasiatic language family. Historically, it is one of the spoken languages of the Israelites and their longest-surviving descendants, the Jews and Samaritans. It was largely preserved ...
:
** . this sentence means "Yesterday I told my friends about the idea I was thinking about". From this example we can see that Hebrew verbs are conjugated by tense/mood and person (including gender and number). In addition, there are prepositions that are also conjugated, but by person, like and . More at:
Modern Hebrew grammar.
Very synthetic
*
Finnish:
**''Käyttäytyessään tottelemattomasti oppilas saa jälki-istuntoa''
**"Should they behave in an insubordinate manner, the student will get detention."
**Structurally: behaviour (present/future tense) (of their) obey (without) (in the manner/style) studying (they who (should be)) gets detention (some). Practically every word is derived and/or inflected. However, this is quite formal language, and (especially in speech) would have various words replaced by more analytic structures: ''Kun oppilas käyttäytyy tottelemattomasti, hän saa jälki-istuntoa'' meaning 'When the student behaves in an insubordinate manner, they will get detention'.
*
Georgian:
** ''gadmogvakht'unebinebdneno'' (''gad-mo-gv-a-kht'un-eb-in-eb-d-nen-o'')
**'They said that they would be forced by them (the others) to make someone to jump over in this direction'.
**The word describes the whole sentence that incorporates tense, subject, direct and indirect objects, their plurality, relation between them, direction of the action, conditional and causative markers, etc.
*
Classical Arabic:
** ' (')
**"And did we give it (masc.) to you futilely?" in Arabic, each word consists of one root that has a basic meaning (' 'give' and ' 'futile'). Prefixes and suffixes are added to make the word incorporate subject, direct and indirect objects, number, gender, definiteness, etc.
Increase in analyticity
Haspelmath and Michaelis observed that analyticity is increasing in a number of European languages. In the
German
German(s) may refer to:
* Germany (of or related to)
**Germania (historical use)
* Germans, citizens of Germany, people of German ancestry, or native speakers of the German language
** For citizens of Germany, see also German nationality law
**Ge ...
example, the first phrase makes use of inflection, but the second phrase uses a preposition. The development of preposition suggests the moving from synthetic to analytic.
It has been argued that analytic grammatical structures are easier for adults
learning a foreign language. Consequently, a larger proportion of non-native speakers learning a language over the course of its historical development may lead to a simpler morphology, as the preferences of adult learners get passed on to second generation native speakers. This is especially noticeable in the grammar of
creole language
A creole language, or simply creole, is a stable natural language that develops from the simplifying and mixing of different languages into a new one within a fairly brief period of time: often, a pidgin evolved into a full-fledged language. ...
s. A 2010 paper in ''
PLOS ONE'' suggests that evidence for this hypothesis can be seen in correlations between morphological complexity and factors such as the number of speakers of a language, geographic spread, and the degree of inter-linguistic contact.
According to
Ghil'ad Zuckermann
Ghil'ad Zuckermann ( he, גלעד צוקרמן, ; ) is an Israeli-born language revivalist and linguist who works in contact linguistics, lexicology and the study of language, culture and identity. Zuckermann is Professor of Linguistics and Ch ...
,
Modern Hebrew
Modern Hebrew ( he, עברית חדשה, ''ʿivrít ḥadašá ', , '' lit.'' "Modern Hebrew" or "New Hebrew"), also known as Israeli Hebrew or Israeli, and generally referred to by speakers simply as Hebrew ( ), is the standard form of the He ...
(which he calls "Israeli") "is much more analytic, both with nouns and verbs", compared with
Classical Hebrew (which he calls "Hebrew").
[See pp. 65-67 in Zuckermann, Ghil‘ad (2020), '' Revivalistics: From the Genesis of Israeli to Language Reclamation in Australia and Beyond'']
Oxford University Press
/
See also
*
Analytic language
*
Bound morpheme
*
Isolating language
*
Linguistic typology
*
Morphological derivation
*
Morphology (linguistics)
In linguistics, morphology () is the study of words, how they are formed, and their relationship to other words in the same language. It analyzes the structure of words and parts of words such as stems, root words, prefixes, and suffixes. Morp ...
References
External links
*
SIL:What is a ''morphological process''?*
SIL:*
SIL:*
Lexicon of Linguistics:InflectionDerivation*
Lexicon of Linguistics:BaseStemRoot* , chapter 4 o
Halvor Eifring & Rolf Theil: ''Linguistics for Students of Asian and African Languages''
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eo:Lingva tipologio#Sintezaj lingvoj