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Why are there so few isolating languages? | ||
Tags: Morphology | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6704 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes  Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map | Message 9 of 17 29 April 2011 at 9:41am | IP Logged | |||||
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It is too simplistic to say that there are two kinds of languages - it is more like a scale where some languages depend more on inflection and others more on combining isolated words, but every combination in between can be found. And as Splog's example with the Russian lady shows, the supposedly 'easy' languages without inflection can be troublesome for those who like the comforting security of rulebased inflections because their own native language is built like that.
I don't know much about Chinese, but Bahasa has practically scrapped all inflections, and English and (even more) Afrikaans are close to doing so. Instead these languages rely on context and more or less fixed word combinations - for instance a substantive(-like) word in Bahasa can be interpreted as singular or plural (think "flour", but apply it on pebbles). But you can force the plural interpretation through by using the word "para" or a numeral in front of it, typically with some sort of 'unity' word - all animals are literally 'tails' in Bahasa. And even though the number of languages who function more or less like this may be rather small numerically, they cover a lot of speakers (just add the number of the speakers for Mandarin, English and Bahasa!). So the isolating strategy has actually been quite successful. The losers in this game seem to be the polysynthetic languages which simply are too difficult to learn, while both the inflectional and the moderately agglutinating languages seem to thrive somewhere in the middle. Edited by Iversen on 03 May 2011 at 11:16am 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Ari Heptaglot Senior Member Norway Joined 6583 days ago 2314 posts - 5695 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Mandarin, Cantonese Studies: Czech, Latin, German | Message 10 of 17 29 April 2011 at 11:38am | IP Logged | |||||
Well, there's debate if Classical Chinese was ever a spoken language, so it's not surprising that if you read an old text out loud, people won't necessarily get it. It's true, however, that since Middle (?) Chinese, the sound system of Mandarin has simplified, which has led to an increase in bisyllabic words. We can see this clearly by comparing with Cantonese, which has retained a richer phonology and more tones, leading to better ability to distinguish monosyllabic words, which also means there are more of them in Cantonese. An illustrative example: The two characters 書 (book) and 梳 (comb) share the same pronunciation in Mandarin (shu1) because of simplified phonology. To disambiguate them, Mandarin places a 子 (neutral tone zi) noun-forming character after 梳, making the bisyllabic word 梳子. So now we have "shu1zi" and "shu1" meaning different things. Cantonese, however, has preserved a difference in pronunciation between the two characters. 書 is "syu1" and 梳 is "so1". Thus no disambiguating character is necessary and Cantonese preserves 梳 as a monosyllabic word. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| gambi Newbie New Zealand Joined 5110 days ago 37 posts - 52 votes Speaks: English Studies: Indonesian, Burmese | Message 11 of 17 29 April 2011 at 1:51pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I fully agree with what Iversen said. It's just way too simplistic to classify all the languages of the world into 2 mutually exclusive categories - isolating (analytic) and synthetic. There is a continuum going from highly isolating (eg. Classical Chinese) to something like Mohawk or Warlpiri which is highly fusional and polysynthetic.
I've studied quite abit of Burmese, and I can tell you that although it's classified as 'isolating' by most linguists Burmese tends to show a significant amount of agglutinative morphology similar to Japanese and Korean. There's even subject-verb agreement wherein a particle is almost always attached to the verb root if the subject is plural. Also, there's inflection on nouns to show plurality similar to the English 's'. And these particles are true bound morphemes which only have a grammatical function, and cannot stand free by themselves. Also, isolating languages are anything but few. In fact they are very common. Assuming that most languages belonging to the Sino-Tibetan family are more or less isolating, that's over 200 languages. Plus there're other language families like Kradai, Austro-Asiatic and Austronesian, most of whose members show more or less isolating morphology, then that's probably another 200 languages. So if you combine all of those languages together, then the number would probably be at least equal to the number of languages belonging to the Indo-European, Altaic and Uralic families combined together. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Raчraч Ŋuɲa Triglot Senior Member New Zealand Joined 5819 days ago 154 posts - 233 votes Speaks: Bikol languages*, Tagalog, EnglishC1 Studies: Spanish, Russian, Japanese | Message 12 of 17 03 May 2011 at 5:49am | IP Logged | |||||
While its true that there are fewer isolating languages than synthetic languages, they're not really few. Lots of languages in China, mainland southeast Asia, central Africa, Papua, Eastern Indonesia and Oceania are isolating. Have a look at this. Edited by Raчraч Ŋuɲa on 03 May 2011 at 5:50am 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| cntrational Triglot Groupie India Joined 5128 days ago 49 posts - 66 votes Speaks: Hindi, Telugu, English* Studies: French | Message 13 of 17 03 May 2011 at 10:24am | IP Logged | |||||
And, yeah, the isolating-synthetic thing is a continuum, not a clean divide. I should note that synthetic languages are usually divided into three subgroups: fusional, agglutinative, and polysynthetic. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Declan1991 Tetraglot Senior Member Ireland Joined 6440 days ago 233 posts - 359 votes Speaks: English*, German, Irish, French | Message 14 of 17 03 May 2011 at 2:39pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Not only is the isolating-synthetic a continuum, but no language is at a fixed point on the scale. I can't remember the exact progression right now, but as far as I remember, isolating languages tend to grow more fusional over time (particles affixing onto words), while fusional languages in turn then grow more analytic over time. So Latin morphed into the Romance languages (losing different inflections in each), and Classical Chinese is growing into the more fusional modern Chineses.
I also seem to recall that the progression is often isolating -> agglutinating -> fusional, because particles simply join together to form agglutinating languages, and then those particles fuse to get inflections. That has to be taken with a pinch of salt though, it's quite an inadequate classification to say that a language is analytical. It might be quite analytical in its nounal morphology, which might morph into a fusional nounal morphology eventually, but be very fusional in its verbs (Japanese I think). So it's really single constructions, whatever they may be, change, not this broad sweeping classification of the language. And of course, complexity and morphology are totally unrelated. Just look at how simple English verbs are from a conjugation point of view, but how difficult it is for many foreigner learners of English to use the correct tense/mood and aspect all the time, particularly in the present tense. Same goes for definite articles, speakers of Russian etc. find them awfully confusing, although in English they don't decline at all. Edited by Declan1991 on 03 May 2011 at 2:46pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| cntrational Triglot Groupie India Joined 5128 days ago 49 posts - 66 votes Speaks: Hindi, Telugu, English* Studies: French | Message 15 of 17 04 May 2011 at 3:11am | IP Logged | |||||
1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Ari Heptaglot Senior Member Norway Joined 6583 days ago 2314 posts - 5695 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Mandarin, Cantonese Studies: Czech, Latin, German | Message 16 of 17 04 May 2011 at 7:34am | IP Logged | |||||
Surely most Brits couldn't speak French after the Norman invasion, but still English has been profoundly affected by it. I agree that the writing system probably isn't enough of an explanation, but I wouldn't deem something as unable to affect the language just because it was unknown to the majority, if those who know it are the elite of the society. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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