Isolating language
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In morphological typology (in linguistics), an isolating language (in fact the most extreme case of an analytic language) is any language in which words are composed of a single morpheme. This is in contrast to a synthetic language which can have words composed of multiple morphemes.
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[edit] Explanation
Although historically languages were divided into three basic types (isolating, flectional, agglutinative), these traditional morphological types are best divided into two distinct parameters:
- morpheme-per-word ratio
- degree of fusion between morphemes
An isolating language can thus be defined as a language that has a one-to-one correspondence between word and morpheme. To illustrate, the English word-form
- boy
is a single word (namely boy) consisting of only a single morpheme (also boy). This word-form would then have a 1:1 morpheme-word ratio. The English word-form
- antigovernment
is a single word-form consisting of three morphemes (namely, anti-, govern, -ment). This word-form would then have a 3:1 morpheme-word ratio.
Languages that are considered to be isolating have a tendency for all words to have a 1:1 morpheme-word ratio. Because of this tendency, these languages are said to "lack morphology" since every word would not have an internal compositional structure in terms of word pieces (i.e. morphemes) — thus they would also lack bound morphemes like affixes. Isolating languages use independent words while synthetic languages tend to use affixes and internal modifications of roots for the same purpose.
The morpheme-per-word ratio should be thought of as a scalar category ranging from low morpheme-per-word ratio (near 1.0) on the isolating pole of the scale to a high morpheme-per-word ratio on the other pole. Languages with a tendency to have morpheme-per-word ratios greater than 1.0 are termed synthetic. The flectional (or fusional) and agglutinative types of the traditional typology can then be considered subtypes of synthetic languages which are distinguished from each other according to the second degree-of-fusion parameter.
Isolating languages are especially common in Southeast Asia, and examples are Vietnamese[1][2] and classical Chinese (as distinct from modern Chinese languages)[3]. Outside China, the majority of mainland Southeast Asian languages are isolating languages with the exception of Malay. Mainland Southeast Asia is home to many of eastern Asia's analytic language families including Tibeto-Burman, Kradai, Hmong-Mien, and Mon-Khmer. Even some Austronesian languages in the region, such as Cham, are more isolating than the rest of their respective family. Burmese, Thai, Khmer, Lao and Vietnamese are all major isolating languages spoken in mainland southeast Asia.
[edit] Examples
Since words are not marked by morphology showing their role in the sentence, word order tends to carry a lot of importance in isolating languages. For example, Chinese makes use of word order to show subject–object relationships. Chinese (of all varieties) is perhaps the best-known analytic language. To illustrate:
-
明天 我 的 朋友 會 爲 我 做 一 個 生日 蛋糕 明天 我 的 朋友 会 为 我 做 一 个 生日 蛋糕 míngtīan wǒ de péngyou huì wèi wǒ zuò yí ge shēngri dàngāo tomorrow I (subordinating particle) friend will for I make one (classifier) birthday cake "Tomorrow my friends will make a birthday cake for me."
As can be seen, comparing the Chinese sentence to the English translation, while English is fairly isolating, it contains a synthetic feature, in the use of the bound morpheme -s (a suffix) to mark plurality. Note that "my" in the English translation is not composed of two morphemes, as may be wrongly supposed by comparing with the Chinese translation, but is a one morpheme word that conveys the same meaning as two one morpheme words in the Chinese translation.
Similarly, in Burmese, whose word order is subject-object-verb, sentence constructs are isolating.
-
မနက်ဖြန် ကျွန်တော်1 ရဲ့ သူငယ်ချင်း မွေးနေ့ ကိတ်မုန့် တစ် ဗန်း ဖုတ် ပေး မည်။2 məneʔpʰyà̃
ma ne' hpyanʧənɔ̀
kya noyḛ
ye.θəŋèʤí̃
tha nge chin:mwéinḛi
mwei: nei.keiʔ mo̰ʊ̃
kei' moun.tə
tabá̃
ban:pʰoʊʔ
hpou'péi
pei:myì
myitomorrow me (subordinating particle) friend birthday cake one (classifier) bake give (future tense particle) "Tomorrow my friends will bake a birthday cake for me."
- 1 Pronoun generally used for males
- 2 Literary form. Colloquial form uses မယ်.
zuò ("do") remains the same in the present tense:
-
"They are doing homework." 他們 在 做 作業 他们 在 做 作业 tāmen zài zuò zuòyè they (tense adverb, now) do homework.
[edit] Analyticity comparison between Hebrew and "Israeli"
According to linguist Ghil'ad Zuckermann, whereas Hebrew was synthetic, "Israeli" (his term for "Modern Hebrew") is much more analytic, both with nouns and with verbs. He argues that although the tendency towards analytic structures may be correlated with language contact in general, "Israeli was more analytic than Hebrew ab initio rather than as a result of analyticization due to post-genesis language contact."[4]
Consider the construct-state, the Semitic Noun-Noun structure in which two nouns are combined, the first being modified or possessed by the second. For example:
repúblika-t banánot
republic-CONSTRUCT bananas
"banana republic"
Unlike in Hebrew, construct-state indicating possession is not productive in Israeli. Compare the Hebrew construct-state ’em ha-yéled "mother- the-child" (two words) with the more analytic Israeli phrase haíma shel ha-yéled "the-mother of the-child" (three words), both meaning "the mother of the child", i.e. "the child’s mother".
According to Zuckermann, analyticity in what he calls "Israeli" is also conspicuous in non-construct-state possession. Israeli favours a Yiddish analytic possessive construction, as in my grandfather, to a synthetic one. Thus, whereas the Hebrew phrase for "my grandfather" consisted of a single word: sav-í "grandfather-my", in Israeli it consists of two words: sába shel-ì "grandfather of-me".
But analyticity is not restricted to noun phrases. There are many non-Hebrew, periphrastic, complex verbal constructions in Israeli. The Israeli expression sam tseaká "shouted" literally means "put a shout" (cf. the Hebrew-descent tsaák "shouted"); natán mabát "looked" literally means "gave a look"; and heíf mabát "looked" literally means "flew/threw a look" (cf. cast a glance, threw a look and tossed a glance — as opposed to the Hebrew-descent verb hebít "looked at"). According to Zuckermann, the analytic grammatical construction (using auxiliary verbs followed by a noun) — employed here for the desire to express swift action — stems from Yiddish. The following Yiddish expressions all mean "to have a look": gébn a kuk, literally "to give a look", ton a kuk, literally "to do a look", and the colloquial khapn a kuk, literally "to catch a look".
Such constructions are not nonce, ad hoc lexical calques of Yiddish. The Israeli system is productive and the lexical realization often differs from that of Yiddish. Consider Israeli hirbíts "hit, beat", which yielded hirbíts mehirút "drove very fast" (mehirút meaning "speed"), hirbíts arukhá "ate a big meal" (arukhá meaning "meal") – cf. English hit the buffet "eat a lot at the buffet", hit the liquor/bottle "drink alcohol". Consider also Israeli dafák hofaá, literally "knocked a show", i.e. "dressed smartly".[5]
[edit] Analytic languages
The term analytic, referring to a morphological type, is synonymous with the term isolating in most contexts. However, it is possible to define analytic as referring to the expression of syntactic information via separate grammatical words instead of via morphology (with bound morphemes). Obviously, using separate words to express syntactic relationships would lead to a more isolating tendency while using inflectional morphology would lead to the language having a more synthetic tendency.
By definition, all isolating languages would also be analytic (in the sense defined in this section). However, it is possible that a language may have virtually no inflectional morphology but have a larger number of derivational affixes. For example, Indonesian has only two inflectional affixes but about 25 derivational morphemes. Indonesian can be considered slightly synthetic[clarification needed] (and thus not isolating) and, in terms of the expression of syntactic information, mostly analytic.
[edit] See also
[edit] References
- ^ "What is an isolating language?". SIL International. 2004. http://www.sil.org/linguistics/GlossaryOfLinguisticTerms/WhatIsAnIsolatingLanguage.htm. Retrieved on 2008-04-28.
- ^ Comrie, Bernard. 1989.Language universals and linguistic typology. 2nd edition. Chicago: University of Chicago
- ^ "isolating language". Encyclopædia Britannica - the Online Encyclopedia. http://www.britannica.com/eb/article-9042948/isolating-language. Retrieved on 2008-04-28.
- ^ See pp. 50-51 in Zuckermann, Ghil'ad, Hybridity versus Revivability: Multiple Causation, Forms and Patterns. In Journal of Language Contact, Varia 2 (2009), pp. 40-67.
- ^ See pp. 50-51 in Zuckermann, Ghil'ad, Hybridity versus Revivability: Multiple Causation, Forms and Patterns. In Journal of Language Contact, Varia 2 (2009), pp. 40-67.
- Sapir, Edward. (1921). Types of linguistic structure. In Language: An introduction to the study of speech (Chap. 6). (Online: www.bartleby.com/186/6.html).
