3.3 Morphology of Different Languages
The way in which morphemes are employed to modify meaning can vary between languages. Morphological typology is a method used by linguists to classify languages according to their morphological structure. While a variety of classification types have been identified, we will look at a common method of classification: analytic, agglutinative and fusional. Figure 3.2 give some examples of morphological typology across the world’s languages.
Analytic languages have a low ratio of morphemes to words. They are often isolating languages in that each morpheme is also a word and vice versa. These languages create sentences with independent root morphemes with grammatical relations between words being expressed with separate words. Examples of analytics or isolating languages include Chinese languages and Vietnamese. While in English we inflect numbers: one day, two days, an analytic language such as Mandarin Chinese has no inflection: 一天, yì tiān “one day”, 三天, sān tiān “three day”. The Canadian linguist and translator Sonja Lang has created an analytic language, Toki Pona, as a minimalist creative endeavour.
Unlike analytic languages, synthetic languages employ inflection or agglutination to express syntactic relationships. Agglutinative languages combine one or more morphemes into one word. The distinguishing feature of these languages is that each morpheme is individually identifiable as a meaningful unit even after combining into a word. Examples of agglutinative languages include Tamil, Secwepemc, Turkish, Japanese, Finnish, Basque and Hungarian. Figure 3.3 shows you an example of agglutination in Turkish. Each coloured morpheme is also given an approximate English translation. Figure 3.2 give another example from Tamil.
Another type of synthetic languages are fusional languages. Like agglutinative languages, fusional languages also combine morphemes to modify meaning. However, these combinations often do not remain distinct and fuse together. In addition, these languages also have a tendency to use a single inflectional morpheme to denote numerous grammatical or syntactic features. For example, the suffix -í in Spanish comí (“I ate”) denotes both first-person singular agreement and preterite tense. Examples of fusional languages include Indo-European languages such as Sanskrit, Spanish, Romanian, and German. Modern English could also be considered fusional; although it has tended to evolve to be more analytic. J. R. R. Tolkien’s fictional language Sindarin is fusional (another elvish language, Quenya, is agglutinative).
Figure 3.2 shows an additional morphological type named polysynthetic. These languages tend to a high morpheme-to-word ratio as well as regular morphology. They often combine a large number of morphemes to form words that are the equivalent of entire sentences in other languages. Many languages in North America such as Mohawk tend to have this type of morphology.
Inflectional Morphology
Inflectio