A synthetic language is a language that is statistically characterized by a higher morpheme-to-word ratio. Rule-wise, a synthetic language is characterized by denoting syntactic relationship between the words via inflection and agglutination, dividing them into fusional or agglutinating subtypes of word synthesis. Further divisions include polysynthetic languages (most of them belonging to an agglutinative subtype, although Navajo and other Athabaskan languages are often classified as belonging to a fusional subtype) and oligosynthetic languages (only found in constructed languages). In contrast, rule-wise, the analytic languages rely more on auxiliary verbs and word order to denote syntactic relationship between the words.
Adding morphemes to a root word is used in inflection to convey a grammatical property of the word, such as denoting a subject or an object.[1] Combining two or more morphemes into one word is used in agglutinating languages, instead.[2] For example, the word fast, if inflectionally combined with er to form the word faster, remains an adjective, while the word teach derivatively combined with er to form the word teacher ceases to be a verb. Some linguists consider relational morphology to be a type of derivational morphology, which may complicate the classification.[3]
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.
In derivational synthesis, morphemes of different types (nouns, verbs, affixes, 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 adjectives, nouns, or prepositions – or are affixes that usually have a single form and meaning:
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 many of the morphemes are related to voice (e.g. passive voice), whether a word is in the subject or object of the sentence, possession, plurality, or other abstract distinctions in a language:
See main article: Agglutinative language. 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.[4] 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. 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).
See main article: Fusional language. 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.[5]
See main article: Polysynthetic language. 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.
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.[6] Though no natural language uses this process, it has found its use in the world of constructed languages, in auxlangs such as Ygyde [7] and aUI.
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 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, 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 order to demonstrate the nature of the isolating-analytic–synthetic–polysynthetic classification as a "continuum", some examples are shown below.
| Chinese text | Chinese: 明天 | Chinese: 我 | Chinese: 的 | Chinese: 朋友 | Chinese: 会 | Chinese: 为 | Chinese: 我 | Chinese: 做 | Chinese: 生日 | Chinese: 蛋糕 | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Transliteration | míngtiān | wǒ | de | péngyou | huì | wèi | wǒ | zuò | shēngrì | dàngāo | ||
| Literal translation | dawn day | I | of | friend friend | will | for | I | make | birth day | egg cake | ||
| Meaning | tomorrow | I | (genitive particle(='s)) | friend | will | for | I | make | birthday | cake | ||
| "Tomorrow my friend(s) will make a birthday cake for me." | ||||||||||||
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 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 (of Confucius for example) and southern dialects to a certain extent is more strictly monosyllabic: 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 pronounced as /link/ and pronounced as /link/ to be indistinguishable before nasal consonants: thus the words "pen" and "pin" are homophones (see pin-pen merger). 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.
| חשב/תי | ש/על/יו | ה/רעיון | על | של/י | ל/חבר/ים | סיפר/תי | אתמול | |
| I thought | that about it | the idea | about | my | to friends | I told | Yesterday |
| Селото | селото | пустото | селото | откак | заселено | |
| That village | that particular village | has always been empty | that village | ever since | it was settled |
The definite articles are not only suffixes but are also noun inflections expressing thought in a synthetic manner.
Haspelmath and Michaelis[9] observed that analyticity is increasing in a number of European languages. In the German 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 languages. 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.[10]
According to Ghil'ad Zuckermann, Modern Hebrew (which he calls "Israeli") "is much more analytic, both with nouns and verbs", compared with Classical Hebrew (which he calls "Hebrew").[11]