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An isolating language is a type of language with a morpheme per word ratio close to one, and with no inflectional morphology whatsoever. In the extreme case, each word contains a single morpheme. Examples of widely spoken isolating languages are Yoruba [1] in West Africa and Vietnamese [2] [3] (especially its colloquial register) in Southeast Asia.
A language isolate is a language that has no demonstrable genetic relationship with any other languages. [ 1 ] [ 2 ] Basque in Europe, Ainu [ 1 ] in Asia, Sandawe in Africa, Haida and Zuni in North America, Kanoê in South America , Tiwi in Australia and Burushaski in Pakistan are all examples of such languages.
An example of SVO order in English is: Andy ate cereal. In an analytic language such as English, subject–verb–object order is relatively inflexible because it identifies which part of the sentence is the subject and which one is the object. ("The dog bit Andy" and "Andy bit the dog" mean two completely different things, while, in case of ...
For example, the construction with "there" in the following English sentence is a presentative: ... a likely language isolate of West Papua, ...
In the last example, it is highly unlikely that fish is the subject and so that word order can be used. In some languages, auxiliary rules of word order can provide enough disambiguation for an emphatic use of OVS. For example, declarative statements in Danish are ordinarily SVnO, with "n" being is the position of negating or modal adverbs ...
Although the Basque language is geographically surrounded by Romance languages, it is a language isolate that is unrelated to them or to any other language. Most scholars believe Basque to be the last remaining descendant of one of the pre-Indo-European languages of prehistoric Europe . [ 15 ]
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 ...
As an example, consider the English sentences below: That apple on the table is fresh. Those two apples on the table are fresh. The quantity of apples is marked on the noun—"apple" singular number (one item) vs. "apples" plural number (more than one item)—on the demonstrative, that/those, and on the verb, is/are.