Analytic language

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Linguistic typology
Morphological
Morphosyntactic
Word order
Lexicon

An analytic language is a type of

affixes very rarely. This is opposed to synthetic languages which synthesize many concepts into a single word, using affixes regularly. Syntactic roles are assigned to words primarily by word order. For example, by changing the individual words in the Latin phrase fēl-is pisc-em cēpit "the cat caught the fish" to fēl-em pisc-is cēpit "the fish caught the cat", the fish becomes the subject, while the cat becomes the object. This transformation is not possible in an analytic language without altering the word order. Typically, analytic languages have a low morpheme-per-word ratio, especially with respect to inflectional morphemes
. No natural language, however, is purely analytic or purely synthetic.

Background

The term analytic is commonly used in

Proto-Germanic and Old English
over the centuries and has not gained any new inflectional morphemes in the meantime, which makes it more analytic than most other Indo-European languages.

For example, Proto-Indo-European had much more complex

postpositions and determiners, Standard English has lost nearly all of them (except for three modified cases for pronouns
) along with genders and dual number and simplified its conjugation.

prepositions, verbal voice, word order, and possessive 's
.

Classical Hebrew with both nouns and verbs.[1]

Isolating language

A related concept is that of

compound words,[2]
which gives it a moderately high ratio of morphemes per word, but since it has almost no inflectional affixes at all to convey grammatical relationships, it is a very analytic language.

English is not totally analytic in its nouns since it uses inflections for number (e.g., "one day, three days; one boy, four boys") and possession ("The boy's ball" vis-à-vis "The boy has a ball"). Mandarin Chinese, by contrast, has no inflections on its nouns: compare 一天 yī tiān 'one day', 三天 sān tiān 'three days' (literally 'three day'); 一個男孩 yī ge nánhái 'one boy' (lit. 'one [entity of] male child'), 四個男孩 sì ge nánhái 'four boys' (lit. 'four [entity of] male child'). Furthermore English is considered to be weakly inflected and comparatively more analytic than most other Indo-European languages.

Persian has features of agglutination, making use of prefixes and suffixes attached to the stems of verbs and nouns, thus making it a synthetic language rather than an analytic one. Persian is an SOV language, thus having a head-final phrase structure. Persian utilizes a noun root + plural suffix + case suffix + postposition suffix syntax similar to Turkish. For example: Mashinhashunra niga mikardam meaning 'I was looking at their cars'. Breaking down mashin+ha+shun+ra (car+s+their+at) we can see its agglutinative nature and the fact that Persian is able to affix a given number of dependent morphemes to a root morpheme (in this example, car).


List of analytic languages

This is a dynamic list and may never be able to satisfy particular standards for completeness. You can help by adding missing items with reliable sources.

See also

References

  1. ^ See pp. 50–51 in Zuckermann, Ghil'ad (2009), "Hybridity versus Revivability: Multiple Causation, Forms and Patterns", Journal of Language Contact, Varia 2, pp. 40–67.
  2. ^ Li, Charles and Thompson, Sandra A., Mandarin Chinese: A Functional Reference Grammar, University of California Press, 1981, p. 46.
  3. ISBN 9780521359405
    . Retrieved 19 May 2010.
  4. ISBN 9783110128550
    . Retrieved 19 May 2010.
  5. ^ Danilevitch, Olga (2019), "Logical Semantics Approach for Data Modeling in XBRL Taxonomies"
  6. ^ "Grammar: Cases". people.umass.edu. Retrieved 2018-04-19.
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