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Which are better at Word Formation? | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| Paco Senior Member Hong Kong Joined 4276 days ago 145 posts - 251 votes  Speaks: Cantonese* | Message 1 of 7 31 December 2015 at 3:14pm | IP Logged |
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What languages allow you to do more with less vocabulary? What languages make extensive use of compounding and have a highly developed morphological system?
Regarding more commonly taught languages, English is certainly less powerful, while Esperanto and Chinese are on the other end of the spectrum. But what about the others? If there have been discussions or papers about this topic, please refer me to them. If not, could you share your hyperpolyglot insight? Thanks a lot. Edit 1: The question put more clearly: Is there any list of morpheme per word ratios of languages? Edited by Paco on 03 January 2016 at 10:49am 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| fireballtrouble Triglot Senior Member Turkey Joined 4523 days ago 129 posts - 203 votes Speaks: Turkish*, French, English Studies: German | Message 2 of 7 31 December 2015 at 9:14pm | IP Logged |
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It's the natural logic of agglutinative languages which have relatively less stem/root
count than their non-agglutinative counterparts but contrarily which enjoy richness of suffix. I don't consider it as a matter of being powerful, it's more of a way to cope with the need of expression. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| vell Newbie United States Joined 3792 days ago 17 posts - 44 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Russian | Message 3 of 7 02 January 2016 at 2:17am | IP Logged |
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Languages with noun incorporation are probably what you're looking for. It's mostly
polysynthetic languages that have this feature. Basically the noun (or adjective or verb or whatever, but usually noun) becomes part of the verb to form one word. There are different possible levels of incorporation, but with a highly incorporating language like Mohawk, you can form an entire sentence with a single word. One word like he-had-deer-killed means he killed a deer. English has weak incorporation, like breastfeed. It's found in a lot of the American Indian languages and in some of the families in Australia and Papua New Guinea (I think...) among other places. Marianne Mithun and Mark Baker both wrote a lot about it if you want to read academic papers. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Paco Senior Member Hong Kong Joined 4276 days ago 145 posts - 251 votes Speaks: Cantonese* | Message 4 of 7 02 January 2016 at 3:42pm | IP Logged |
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Thanks you. It seems I have not raised the question intended, but nonetheless got answers for an intriguing one - to me at least.
The question I originally intended to ask may be something like this: Which languages has a smaller inventory of morphemes? Languages do not usually differ in their power to express ideas, but some do so with less morphemes, while others employ more. For example, English often uses words of different etymologies to convey formality when it is sometimes just a difference in inflection in Japanese. Another example is that English uses such different words as (the classic example, sometimes humiliating) shrimp, prawn, and lobster when Chinese only says small shrimps, big shrimps, and dragon-shrimps. One more example is cow, beef, and bovine, versus just cow whatsoever in Chinese. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Derian Triglot Senior Member PolandRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5307 days ago 227 posts - 464 votes Speaks: Polish*, English, German Studies: Spanish, Russian, Czech, French, Mandarin, Japanese | Message 5 of 7 02 January 2016 at 4:49pm | IP Logged |
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synthetic_language
"In linguistic typology, a synthetic language is a language with a high morpheme-per-word ratio, as opposed to a low morpheme-per-word ratio in what is described as an analytic language." You are wrong saying that Chinese is on the other end of the spectrum, because - quite on the contrary - Chinese has one of the lowest morpheme-per-word ratios there is. From what I remember, Chinese had a 1.01 ratio [the lowest possible being, of course, a 1.0], English a 1.27, whereas Polish had something like a 2.x or more, for comparison. Don't quote me on the last number though, I had this lecture at the university some 9 years ago ;) 2 persons have voted this message useful | |
| Skeeter Diglot Newbie United States Joined 4474 days ago 1 posts - 1 votes Speaks: English*, French Studies: Portuguese, Japanese, German, Italian, Spanish, Russian, Dutch | Message 6 of 7 03 January 2016 at 1:29am | IP Logged |
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I've lurked this forum for so long, and finally I have something to say.
Derian makes a good point about inflectional morphology, but I think the OP is more interested in derivational morphology. I don't have enough knowledge of any Chinese language to say for sure, but it does seem they make extensive use of compound words, although on the other hand they might just have been collocations. I think the OP is looking for agglutinating languages like Turkish or Hungarian, which make extensive use of derivational morphology, ending up with vocabularies that are just as extensive yet made of relatively few roots compared with languages that make less use of derivational morphology, or as the OP said, use entirely different words for different nuances. Japanese has prominent agglutinating inflectional and derivational morphology, but in my experience the derivational morphology is comparable to English in productivity. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Paco Senior Member Hong Kong Joined 4276 days ago 145 posts - 251 votes Speaks: Cantonese* | Message 7 of 7 03 January 2016 at 3:26am | IP Logged |
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Dear Derian,
O! I can't resist, for the numbers I desire! If you insist, please decide kindly between the lives of yours and the lecturer's. If nothing else, it'll feed my curiosity! I have found a few tables and combined them together below, though I hope I will be able to locate better, more modern ones, if they exist; especially those after the boom of computational linguistics. I am sorry that I did not include your data because they are 9 years old; no, age is not a problem, but your English ratio differs quite a lot from other tables I found. Nonetheless, your Polish ratio seems to agree with the combined table. I wonder which one has a lower ratio, Vietnamese or Chinese, and I believe you are right, that Chinese has one of the lowest morpheme-per-word ratios, which means I was right, too (I am sorry; I find the first post ambiguous and confusing too!). However, I was wrong that the ratios alone would appease my appetite. A low morpheme-per-word ratio can imply either of the followings: 1) a language makes extensive use of compounding and/or have a highly developed morphological system, or 2) a language has as many morphemes as it has words, and it indeed has lots of both of them. I would attribute my surprise at English having such a low ratio to the fact that I did not realise the possibility of (2) when I started the thread; and I would claim, by intuition, that Chinese is a case of (1). The combined table of ratios of morphemes per word: West Greenlandic 3.72 Sanskrit _______2.59 Swahili ________2.55 written Turkish __2.33 Yakut _________2.17 Old English _____2.12 Lezgian ________1.92 German _______1.92 Greek _________1.82 spoken Turkish __1.75 Modern English __1.68 Persian ________1.52 Vietnamese _____1.06 Sources: Understanding Morphology, pp. 6 (by Martin Haspelmath & Andrea Sims) Wikipedia - Agglutination Greenberg, Joseph. (1960) A Quantitative Approach to the Morphological Typology of Language. International Journal of American Linguistics, 26, pp. 178-194. There are other interesting ratios in Greenberg's paper as well, such as the ratios of agglutination, prefixing, suffixing, gross inflection, and pure inflection. Edited by Paco on 03 January 2016 at 10:50am 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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