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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 ...
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 ]
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 analytic forms are also generally preferred in the western and northern dialects, except in answer to what would in English be "yes/no" questions, while Munster Irish prefers the synthetic forms. For example, the following are the standard form, synthetic form and analytical form of the past tense of rith "to run":
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 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.
In many inflected languages, such as Russian, Latin, and Greek, departures from the default word-orders are permissible but usually imply a shift in focus, an emphasis on the final element, or some special context. In the poetry of these languages, the word order may also shift freely to meet metrical demands.