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The field organizes languages on the basis of how those languages form words by combining morphemes. Analytic languages contain very little inflection, instead relying on features like word order and auxiliary words to convey meaning. Synthetic languages, ones that are not analytic, are divided into two categories: agglutinative and fusional ...
Inflection of the Scottish Gaelic lexeme for 'dog', which is cù for singular, chù for dual with the number dà ('two'), and coin for plural. In linguistic morphology, inflection (less commonly, inflexion) is a process of word formation [1] in which a word is modified to express different grammatical categories such as tense, case, voice, aspect, person, number, gender, mood, animacy, and ...
An analytic language is a type of natural language in which a series of root/stem words is accompanied by prepositions, postpositions, particles and modifiers, using affixes very rarely. This is opposed to synthetic languages , which synthesize many concepts into a single word, using affixes regularly.
The resulting phrase includes two or more collocated words instead of one inflected word. [6] Periphrastic forms are a characteristic of analytic languages, whereas the absence of periphrasis is a characteristic of synthetic languages. While periphrasis concerns all categories of syntax, it is most visible with verb catena.
Inflected languages have a freer word order than modern English, an analytic language in which word order identifies the subject and object. [ 1 ] [ 2 ] As an example, even though both of the following sentences consist of the same words, the meaning is different: [ 1 ]
1P k-tįmi REL -land x-įnn go- CERT. MASC nį-y PRES - MASC ya. 1P Ya k-tįmi x-įnn nį-y ya. 1P REL-land go-CERT.MASC PRES-MASC 1P 'I go to my land.' Africa Some Nilo-Saharan languages such as Lugbara are also considered fusional. Loss of fusionality Fusional languages generally tend to lose their inflection over the centuries, some much more quickly than others. Proto-Indo-European was ...
In many languages, words appear in several inflected forms. For example, in English, the verb 'to walk' may appear as 'walk', 'walked', 'walks' or 'walking'. The base form, 'walk', that one might look up in a dictionary, is called the lemma for the word. The association of the base form with a part of speech is often called a lexeme of the word.
The distinction is, therefore, a matter of degree. The most analytic languages, isolating languages, consistently have one morpheme per word, while at the other extreme, in polysynthetic languages such as some Native American languages [8] a single inflected verb may contain as much information as an entire English sentence.