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Polysynthesis vs. agglutination | ||
Tags: Agglutinative languages | Morphology | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Philological Room |  | |
| Maypal Pentaglot Newbie Russian Federation Joined 4872 days ago 32 posts - 40 votes Speaks: Russian*, Icelandic, English, Danish, Faroese Studies: Greenlandic, Scottish Gaelic | Message 17 of 21 28 September 2011 at 1:02am | IP Logged | ||||||||
The independent use of affixes is quite untypical, occasional at best, for those polysynthetic languages I'm acquainted with.
That would probably be first steps towards incorporation, but there are better examples with "full-weight" words, such as Eng. "whale meat" (whale-meat? whalemeat?), or Dan. synliggøre 'to bring into light, lit. to visible-make'. There can be several degrees of incorporation power, from 0% to 100%: 1. I'm eating the meat of bear/the bearish meat/(the) bear's meat 2. I'm eating (the) bear-meat 3. I'm bear's meat-eating (eat=suf.) (Greenlandic) 4. I'm bear-meat-eating (eat=verb) (Chukchi and other pure polysynthetic languages) English and many other Germanic languages are eventually on their half-way towards incorporation. But bearing in mind they're also loosing their inflectional morphology, the practical difference between incorporation and analytism is becoming lesser and lesser.
That's not true once again!! These elements are quite recognizable and distinguishable in the polysynthetic languages as well. I could show you lots of other examples from Chukchi, but I just can't afford so much typing at the moment. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6514 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 18 of 21 28 September 2011 at 11:22am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Well, I can see from Maypal's examples that the elements actually are recognizable, so my ideas about polysynthetic words being one big unanalyzable mess don't fit those examples. However I had just extended the usual explanation about synthetic languages versus agglutinating ones, namely that you can see the elements one by one in the later, while the endings have been unanalyzable multifunctional entities in the synthetic languages. It was a logical, but apparently erroneous step to take to assume to polysynthetical languages were even more intractable than the synthetical ones.
Is it then correct to say that polysynthetic languages make long chains of morphemes which could be isolated words - but typically aren't - while agglutinating languages are those which form long chains of endings , which have lost any semblance of independence long ago? And synthetical are those with clear roots, but messy endings? Edited by Iversen on 05 October 2011 at 3:19pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Maypal Pentaglot Newbie Russian Federation Joined 4872 days ago 32 posts - 40 votes Speaks: Russian*, Icelandic, English, Danish, Faroese Studies: Greenlandic, Scottish Gaelic | Message 19 of 21 04 October 2011 at 10:05pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
I don't know, I think the "could be isolated words" criteria is very unclear. We can put it otherwise: affixes (suffixes) in the synthetical (inflectional) languages express in most cases grammatical information, while it can be both grammatical and lexical as in the polysynthetic languages and the maximum number of affixes is higher than on average. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6514 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 20 of 21 05 October 2011 at 3:18pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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That distinction also gives problems. Since writing the earlier messages I have had a short peek into a Greenlandic grammar, and as far as I can see most of the affixes there could also be seen as grammatical (indications of number and person and time/mode for verbs, case and number for substantives). Besides the argument about number of 'lexical' entities in words in polysynthetical languages is blurred by the number of compound words in languages like Russian, German and Danish.
The one thing I can see is that there are languages which typically use combinations of separate words instead of compounds (and even here the differences in speech are much less clear than they are in writing), and that there are languages which are fairly extreme at both ends of the scale. Besides there are languages where once free words not only have become dependent or even reduced to morphemes, and in the process they may have lost most of their original meaning. But even at that stage there will be some that not only have lost their independence, but also merged with other common elements while changing there outer shape until we just had unanalyzable endings with several distinct functions left. And in one single language all these stages can be represented. Trying to divide languages into isolating, agglutinating, synthetic and even polysynthetic has simply been a disaster from the beginning - what we have are just tendencies that to a higher or lower degree can be present in any given language. It can only be logical to characterize a language as a whole using those names if it is extreme in all respects. Edited by Iversen on 05 October 2011 at 3:24pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Marc Frisch Heptaglot Senior Member Germany Joined 6476 days ago 1001 posts - 1169 votes Speaks: German*, French, English, Spanish, Portuguese, Turkish, Italian Studies: Persian, Tamil | Message 21 of 21 09 October 2011 at 1:06pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
"An Introduction to Language" by Fromkin et.al. gives a different definition: Depending on the morpheme-to-word ratio languages can be situated somewhere on a scale between "isolating/analytic" (morpheme-to-word ratio close to 1) to "synthetic" (high morpheme-to-word ratio). Synthetic languages are divided into two subcategories: fusional languages, in which multiple morpheme one affix may express multiple grammatical functions (e.g. number, person and gender), and agglutinating languages, in which each grammatical function has its separate affix. As I understand it, the term "polysynthetic" is mostly used in the meaning of "very synthetic"; my guess would be that when the first polysynthetic were described, the label "very synthetic" was already so firmly associated with languages like Sanskrit or Latin that it was deemed necessary to create a new label to express the considerably higher degree of synthesis. Of course, a language does not have to fit purely into one or the other category: the Spanish verbal system is highly fusional, whereas Spanish nouns are analytic. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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