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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 ...
This is a list of grammatical cases as they are used by various inflectional languages that have declension. This list will mark the case, when it is used, an example of it, and then finally what language(s) the case is used in.
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 ...
The Indo-European and Semitic languages are the most typically cited examples of fusional languages. [1] However, others have been described. For example, Navajo is sometimes categorized as a fusional language because its complex system of verbal affixes has become condensed and irregular enough that discerning individual morphemes is rarely ...
In linguistic typology, polysynthetic languages, formerly holophrastic languages, [1] 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 to stand alone). They are very highly inflected languages.
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.
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] "The dog chased a cat." "A cat chased the dog."
For example, Mandarin Chinese has many compound words, [2] which gives it a moderately high ratio of morphemes per word, but since it has almost no inflectional affixes at all to convey grammatical relationships, it is a very analytic language. English is not totally analytic in its nouns since it uses inflections for number (e.g., "one day ...