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This article was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment, between 24 August 2020 and 9 December 2020. Further details are available on the course page. Student editor(s): Sanjith.rajesh. Peer reviewers: Izabellahernandez.
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Is there a reason for mentioning English irregular verbs? Aren't regular ones inflected too? --Eric
I-class 1: spin (for some speakers), drink, swim, sing, sink I-class 2: write, ride, smite O-class : blow, throw, grow
I'd also like to point out that the Mohawk word given is not an inflected word, but a polysynthetic word. The terms "inflected" and "synthetic" are still synonyms in the common imagination, but linguistically the two are extremely different. thefamouseccles 09:20 22 Nov 2003 (UTC)
There are strong arguments that English isn't a creole, and no consensus that it is ( http://www.zompist.com/lang18.html#20 - Sci.lang FAQ). There are probably better examples of creoles with reduced inflections, more suitable for this page. Carandol 12:16, 23 Sep 2004 (UTC)
I have corrected the definition previously given, but in my opinion, the definition I have given is somewhat rough and ready - it requires someone more well-versed in linguistics to complete the transformation into a proper encyclopedia entry. -- firstfox 12:06, 1 Dec 2004 (UTC)
See my discussion @ Inflection: How is Inflection being confused with Synthesis?
&
some suggested reference sites: links.
News to me. Or maybe the sentence needs to be rewritten.
Could knowledgeable speakers of the example languages please expand on the examples under the headings Rather synthetic, Very synthetic, and Polysynthetic? It would be better to have a morpheme-by-morpheme gloss as well as the idiomatic translation into English. -- Jim Henry | Talk 17:56, 2 August 2005 (UTC)
Could someone please explain to a complete novice in the subject why "unthinkably" was used as an example of derivational synthesis? It looks relational, at least by the definition on the page. The only root word in it is "think", while "un-", "-able", and "-ly" all appear to be bound morphemes. TCC (talk) (contribs) 03:23, 4 November 2005 (UTC)
There is, as far as I know, a mistake in that differentiation. Within the derivational class they include what would normally be called "compound synthesis", in which free morphemes (such as the German example given) are bounded, instead of bound morphemes (such as the unthinkable example). By the way, in linguistics jargon, the difference between derivation (in this strict sense, with bound morphemes) and relation, is that the bound morphemes of derivation are lexemes (-un) or, if not, they produce a syntactic change (-ly), whereas bound morphemes of relation are never lexemes nor produce a syntactic change. YoungSpinoza 00:03, 17 December 2005 (UTC)
I think the first Japanese example actually shows it as an analytic language.. since the word is actually Sino-Japanese and we all know that Chinese is analytic. Is anyone going to say 停車場 (carpark, or stop-car-area, same idea) in Chinese is synthetic. The individual words have their own meanings so are morphemes, right? One page also mentioned that Japanese nouns are more analytic but verbs are synthetic.
The second Japanese example however is a "native" Japanese word therefore synthetic. By the way, why "station where the train stops" and not "train station"? Someone please tell me if I'm right. 203.218.91.57 08:51, 25 March 2006 (UTC)
I, too, am skeptical about the Japanese examples. The current text says:
Japanese: Watashitachi ni totte, kono naku kodomo no shashin wa miseraregatai mono desu means strictly literally, "In our case, these pictures of children crying are things that are difficult to be shown," approximately We cannot bear being shown these pictures of children crying in more idiomatic English. In the example, virtually every word has more than one morpheme and some have up to five (the particles ni, no, wa are enclitic case markers, i.e., they are phonologically part of the previous word).
But the fact that these particles are clitics does not prove that the language is synthetic. Clitics are sometimes analysed as independent words by native speakers. For example, see here a list of English clitics. FilipeS 19:54, 26 November 2006 (UTC)
I'm only a beginner in Japanese, but it appears to me that the hiragana transcription differs from the given roumaji example; where the roumaji reads Watashitachi ni (私たしたちに), the hiragana displays Watachi ni (私たちに). TWB 86.138.73.142 11:27, 22 September 2006 (UTC)
My interest in the difference between inflected and polysynthetic is piqued. I am also wondering what it is that makes that Mohawk word a word ... is the speed at which it is spoken? Could it not stand alone as a sentence/clause? It's only clear that it's word to me because there aren't any spaces in it, which seems like a trivial typographical thing. I think the reader could benefit from a clearer definition of "word". Great article. Boris B 09:05, 8 January 2007 (UTC)
Edward Sapir in Language mentions teaching speakers of one of the polysynthetic Indian languages of BC (or perhaps Alaska) how to transcribe their language. He remarks that they had no hesitation in deciding where the boundaries of individual words were, even though one word in the relevant language could be equivalent to an entire sentence in English. If anyone is dying of curiosity to know more details, I can look up the exact reference and surrounding circumstances.
Floozybackloves ( talk) 08:19, 12 February 2010 (UTC)
I'd be interested to see a rating of "the degree to which a language is synthetic." I'm new to linguistics; has anyone come across anything like that? Maybe an estimate of morpheme-to-word ratio in a given language, given typical usage? I understand there would be a lot of variability within a single language (e.g. the difference between formal and informal speech), among other problems, but I'm just throwing some ideas out there. Kevrhodes 00:00, 27 August 2007 (UTC)
as for the examples, it would be good that someone who knows (not my case) classed languages with the largest number of speakers or spoken in different continents, such as Chinese, Spanish or Portuguese, for demonstrative purposes.
as for Spanish, being myself a native speaker (yet not linguist) I'd say that it is rather analytic or, in any case, a rather isolating. This is maybe worth the note, but I'd rather have someone who really knows about how to put it in correct terms. Mountolive group using a loop of another pop group 21:31, 11 June 2008 (UTC) θð — Preceding unsigned comment added by 151.248.27.74 ( talk) 11:23, 20 March 2014 (UTC)
I can follow the English, Japanese and Finnish examples, but I feel I really need a bit of help with the others. And I don't think I'm the only one for whom these examples are completely meaningless, so I think these are in need of syntax trees. Shinobu ( talk) 13:17, 11 September 2008 (UTC)
Shouldnt there be short introductions of those in the article? arent they part of syntethic aswell? Luka Jačov ( talk) 17:12, 10 November 2008 (UTC)
Why is the Turkish example "Afyonkarahisarlılaştıramayabileceklerimizden misiniz" amongst the relational synthesis' examples, when it has clearly synthesized a whole sentence to one word? Shouldn't it be an example for polysynthesis? -- 189.18.128.108 ( talk) 22:18, 27 April 2009 (UTC)
Is this example appropriate? The text says "each word is one morpheme", which is not true. Words like 生日 are clearly bimorphemic (birth-day), and in fact most nouns in Chinese are compound words like this. Jerry Packard's 2000 book The Morphology of Chinese says a lot about this. Should the example be changed, or at least should the explanatory text be modified? rʨanaɢ talk/ contribs 21:42, 27 May 2009 (UTC)
It could help to clear this up a little bit. If I've understood correctly, an example of an Oligosynthetic language would be Newspeak, described by George Orwell in 1984 —Preceding unsigned comment added by 93.144.16.237 ( talk) 14:25, 17 June 2009 (UTC)
There is also an entirely-different meaning of "synthetic language".
Think of Esperanto, Interlingua, etc. See: constructed language. 98.81.1.45 ( talk) 17:03, 20 August 2010 (UTC)
That's why these are called "constructed languages". Synthetics here is in the jargon of lingustic. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 62.202.110.148 ( talk) 21:16, 29 December 2010 (UTC)
This sentence isn't clear at all to me.
Can the author please explain where the "with" and "link" came from? -TMI
German word for "member" is Mitglied, which comes from mit ("with") and Glied ("link of a chain"), at least according to the author, because I didn't find any evidence on that etymology. It's very poorly written. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 87.204.156.74 ( talk) 17:19, 24 August 2016 (UTC)
An editor tried to translate the Hungarian example into what he thinks is English by using indesecretable. I cannot parse this alleged word. I looked for it in a couple of dictionaries. Google provides 191 hits -- this article and 190 mirrors of it. No encyclopedia should be in the business of introducing new words (that would be OR). Someone, please fix this abomination. 71.178.95.236 ( talk) 22:08, 12 December 2013 (UTC)
The hungarian example is not representative to the language. We here in hungary use that word (megszentségteleníthetetlenségeskedéseitekért) as a joke and I do not know a single hungarian word of similar length that is practical. Besides, I, and probably others too, did not understood that word the first time we have heard it. Consider at least noting that this is a joke-word, since maybe the examples of other languages are more serious and representative. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 46.249.133.113 ( talk) 07:21, 1 February 2014 (UTC)
The English example, "antidisestablishmentarianism" is similar in that I've only ever heard of it as a novelty word whose peculiarity is its unusually high degree of derivational synthesis. So it's not actually representative of the language in general, only what's possible at the extremes of it. -- 68.238.247.27 ( talk) 04:31, 9 March 2018 (UTC)
The Greek example given, υπερχοληστερολαιμία, is a borrowing of a compound constructed in international scientific terminology. That doesn't make it any less of a Greek word, however, I don't think it's a good example of the synthetic nature of Greek, since exactly the same word (hypercholesterolemia) is found in English, French, etc. I think it would be better to find a compound constructed within Greek. -- Macrakis ( talk) 14:43, 19 May 2015 (UTC)
Can someone add a normal gloss to the given examples? For now it's a pseudo-glossy English translation that makes no sense. For instance:
przystanek => "beside-stand-little"
This example suggests that 'ek means little, which is ridiculous, because someone may think that ek is an actual weird meaning little, while it's only a diminutive suffix.
Also, why are some words in italics, some in quotation marks, some divided into morphemes by hyphens, some not? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 87.204.156.74 ( talk) 16:57, 24 August 2016 (UTC)
Can someone explain the child labor law example in the English section? I say these words very distinctly, I'm not sure why the article says what it does. There are three separate stresses. "Child" "labor" "law". ?? — Preceding unsigned comment added by Atmilios ( talk • contribs) 01:04, 14 September 2017 (UTC)
The article says that the spaces between the words in "child labor law" are only an orthographic convention and therefore not significant; consider that "code word" and "codeword" are both valid nouns (or noun phrases) in English. That's the argument as I understand it, although I'm not entirely convinced it's a legitimate one. -- 68.238.247.27 ( talk) 04:50, 9 March 2018 (UTC)
Child labor law is quite different from antidisestablishmentarianism in that it's made up of free morphemes (also known as lexemes, or – much more plainly – words). Child, labor, and law are each a lexeme in themselves. Anti-, dis-, -ment, -arian, and -ism are all bound morphemes: they don't work as words themselves. The fact that child labor law is sometimes works like a single word is highly context-specific, and probably not a good example here.
"Morphemes which _may_ occur alone are FREE FORMS; morphemes which may not occur alone are BOUND FORMS. [emphasis and capitalisation as in original]" [1] Zach Beauvais ( talk) 15:18, 25 October 2019 (UTC)
Zach Beauvais ( talk) 15:18, 25 October 2019 (UTC)
References
The template says the distinction is unclear, but I think the article as it currently stands defines the difference very clearly: derivational synthesis is synthesis of free morphemes, and relational synthesis is synthesis by bound morphemes. As other users have pointed out, some of the examples are of questionable quality, but that's a separate issue. Can we remove this tag? -- 68.238.247.27 ( talk) 04:39, 9 March 2018 (UTC)
Actually, reading the article again, the given definition of derivational synthesis includes using affixes (which are bound morphemes by definition) to construct words. So now I don't understand it either. This makes it seem like derivational synthesis is a superset of relational synthesis, but that doesn't sound correct. -- 68.238.247.27 ( talk) 05:00, 9 March 2018 (UTC)
In Burmese, there are endings for words depending on their grammatical case. For example, the dative ending is အား. As there are such endings word-order does not alter the meaning. SOV word order is not the only order. OSV is also accepted at the same level. Therefore, Burmese is not a Analytic language. For more information refer to the work of Judson on Burmese Grammar. H.Myoe Khant ( talk) 02:09, 13 August 2018 (UTC)
After the latest changes in the lead, it contains what I see as a very serious mistake in describing fusional and agglutinating languages. Sentences like these are wrong: ... adding affixes (characteristic for fusional languages, ...); Combining two or more morphemes into one word is used in agglutinating languages. Of course adding affixes is nothing but a form of combining morphemes, and this is not what separates fusional languages from agglutinating ones: the difference is that in fusional languages the morphemes often represent several grammatical traits at once, rather than just one per morpheme.
I might be missing other mistakes, and for this reason I'd like to hear other points of view before editing the page. Jotamar ( talk) 22:39, 4 October 2023 (UTC)