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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 isolating language. This linguistic classification is largely independent of morpheme-usage classifications (such as fusional, agglutinative, etc.), although there is a common tendency for agglutinative languages to exhibit synthetic properties.
Synthetic languages are frequently contrasted with isolating languages. It is more accurate to conceive of languages as existing on a continuum, with the isolating pole (consistently one morpheme per word) at one end and highly polysynthetic languages (in which a single inflected verb may contain as much information as an entire English sentence with various words such as a noun, an adjective, and an adverb) at the other extreme. Synthetic languages tend to lie around the middle of this scale.
Synthetic languages are numerous and well-attested. Most Semitic languages such as Arabic, and many languages of the Americas, including Navajo, Nahuatl, Mohawk and Quechua are synthetic.
More specifically, this includes Indo-European languages of the Romance family (Latin, Italian, French, Romanian, Spanish etc.), of the Germanic family (German, Dutch language etc.), of the Slavic family (Russian, Ukrainian, Polish, Czech, Slovak, Serbo-Croatian etc.), of the Indoaryan family (Sanskrit, Hindi, Persian etc.) as well as Greek, Albanian, Armenian, Latvian and Lithuanian.
However, some languages belonging to these families have become more analytic over time, like English, Afrikaans and Hebrew.
There are several ways in which a language can exhibit synthetic characteristics:
In derivational synthesis, morphemes of different types (nouns, verbs, affixes, etc.) are joined to create new words. For example:
In relational synthesis, root words are joined to bound morphemes to show grammatical function:
In order to demonstrate the "continuum" nature of the isolating–synthetic–polysynthetic classification, some examples are shown below:
However, with rare exceptions, each syllable in Mandarin (corresponding to a single written character) represents a morpheme with an identifiable meaning, even if many of such morphemes are bound. This gives rise to the common misconception that Chinese consists exclusively of "words of one syllable". As the sentence above illustrates, however, Chinese words expressing even the simplest concepts—such as míngtiān 'tomorrow' (míng "bright" + tīan "day") and péngyou 'friend' (a compound of péng and yǒu, both of which mean 'friend')—are typically synthetic compound words.
Oligosynthetic languages are a theoretical notion created by Benjamin Whorf with no known examples existing in natural languages. Such languages would be functionally synthetic, but make use of a very limited array of morphemes (perhaps just a few hundred). Whorf proposed that Nahuatl was oligosynthetic, but this has since been discounted by most linguists.
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