Isolating language - AbsoluteAstronomy.com

An isolating language is a type of language

Linguistic typology

Linguistic typology is a subfield of linguistics that studies and classifies languages according to their structural features. Its aim is to describe and explain the common properties and the structural diversity of the world's languages...

with a low morpheme

Morpheme

In linguistics, a morpheme is the smallest semantically meaningful unit in a language. The field of study dedicated to morphemes is called morphology. A morpheme is not identical to a word, and the principal difference between the two is that a morpheme may or may not stand alone, whereas a word,...

-per-word ratio — in the extreme case of an isolating language words are composed of a single morpheme

Morpheme

. A closely related concept is the analytic language, which in the extreme case does not use any inflections to indicate grammatical relationships (but which may still form compound words or may change the meanings of individual words with derivational morphemes, either of which processes gives more than one morpheme per word).

Isolating languages are in contrast to synthetic language

Synthetic language

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...

s, where words often consist of multiple morphemes. This linguistic classification is subdivided into the classifications fusional

Fusional language

A fusional language is a type of synthetic language, distinguished from agglutinative languages by its tendency to overlay many morphemes in a way that can be difficult to segment....

, agglutinative

Agglutinative language

An agglutinative language is a language that uses agglutination extensively: most words are formed by joining morphemes together. This term was introduced by Wilhelm von Humboldt in 1836 to classify languages from a morphological point of view...

, and polysynthetic, which are based on how the morphemes are combined.

Explanation

Although historically languages were divided into three basic types (isolating, flectional, agglutinative), these traditional morphological types can be 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 relationship between words and morphemes, the English word-form

boy

is a single word (namely boy) consisting of only a single morpheme (also boy). This word-form has 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 has a 3:1 morpheme-word ratio. On average, words in English have a morpheme-to-word ratio substantially greater than one.

Similarly, in the synthetic language Russian

Russian language

Russian is a Slavic language used primarily in Russia, Belarus, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan. It is an unofficial but widely spoken language in Ukraine, Moldova, Latvia, Turkmenistan and Estonia and, to a lesser extent, the other countries that were once constituent republics...

, the word-form

malchik (мальчик)

consists of a root word (namely mal-/маль- ~ small) and personal noun affix (namely -chik/-чик), with 2:1 morpheme-word ratio. The Russian word-form

antipravitelstvennyi (антиправительственный)

is a single word-form consisting of six morphemes (namely, anti-/анти-, prav/прав ~ govern, personal verbal noun affix -itel/-тель, noun affix -stv/-ств, adjectival affix -en/-ен, number and gender affix -nyi/-ный), with 6:1 morpheme-word ratio.

Languages that are purely (or, relatively) isolating have a 1:1 (or, close to 1:1) morpheme-word ratio. In the pure case, these languages are said to "lack morphology" since no word has an internal compositional structure in terms of word pieces (i.e. morphemes) — thus they lack bound morphemes like affixes. Isolating languages use only independent words for grammatical purposes while synthetic languages often use affix

Affix

An affix is a morpheme that is attached to a word stem to form a new word. Affixes may be derivational, like English -ness and pre-, or inflectional, like English plural -s and past tense -ed. They are bound morphemes by definition; prefixes and suffixes may be separable affixes...

es and internal modifications of roots

Root (linguistics)

The root word is the primary lexical unit of a word, and of a word family , which carries the most significant aspects of semantic content and cannot be reduced into smaller constituents....

for those purposes.

The morpheme-per-word ratio is 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. Languages with a morpheme-per-word ratio greater than 1.0 are termed synthetic. The "flectional" (or fusional) and agglutinative types of the traditional typology are considered subtypes of synthetic languages which are distinguished from each other according to the second parameter mentioned above, degree-of-fusion, which is based on the ratio of units of grammatical meaning per inflectional morpheme (agglutinative languages are 1:1, while fusional languages are greater than 1:1).

Analytic languages are especially common in Southeast Asia, and examples are Vietnamese

Vietnamese language

Vietnamese is the national and official language of Vietnam. It is the mother tongue of 86% of Vietnam's population, and of about three million overseas Vietnamese. It is also spoken as a second language by many ethnic minorities of Vietnam...

and Chinese

Chinese language

The Chinese language is a language or language family consisting of varieties which are mutually intelligible to varying degrees. Originally the indigenous languages spoken by the Han Chinese in China, it forms one of the branches of Sino-Tibetan family of languages...

. Modern Chinese has lost some of the synthetic features of Old Chinese

Old Chinese

The earliest known written records of the Chinese language were found at a site near modern Anyang identified as Yin, the last capital of the Shang dynasty, and date from about 1200 BC....

, such as syllable modification (modern tonal alteration being a relic) for verbification and utilisation of the "s-" causative prefix found in many Sino-Tibetan languages. Outside China, the majority of mainland Southeast Asian languages are isolating languages with the exception of Malay

Malay language

Malay is a major language of the Austronesian family. It is the official language of Malaysia , Indonesia , Brunei and Singapore...

. Mainland Southeast Asia is home to many of eastern Asia's analytic language families including Tibeto-Burman, Tai–Kadai, Hmong–Mien, and Mon–Khmer. Even some Austronesian languages in the region, such as Cham

Cham language

Cham is the language of the Cham people of Southeast Asia, and formerly the language of the kingdom of Champa in central Vietnam. A member of the Malayo-Polynesian branch of the Austronesian family, it is spoken by 100,000 people in Vietnam and up to 220,000 people in Cambodia . There are also...

, are more isolating than the rest of their respective family. Burmese

Burmese language

The Burmese language is the official language of Burma. Although the constitution officially recognizes it as the Myanmar language, most English speakers continue to refer to the language as Burmese. Burmese is the native language of the Bamar and related sub-ethnic groups of the Bamar, as well as...

, Thai

Thai language

Thai , also known as Central Thai and Siamese, is the national and official language of Thailand and the native language of the Thai people, Thailand's dominant ethnic group. Thai is a member of the Tai group of the Tai–Kadai language family. Historical linguists have been unable to definitively...

, Khmer

Khmer language

Khmer , or Cambodian, is the language of the Khmer people and the official language of Cambodia. It is the second most widely spoken Austroasiatic language , with speakers in the tens of millions. Khmer has been considerably influenced by Sanskrit and Pali, especially in the royal and religious...

, Lao

Lao language

Lao or Laotian is a tonal language of the Tai–Kadai language family. It is the official language of Laos, and also spoken in the northeast of Thailand, where it is usually referred to as the Isan language. Being the primary language of the Lao people, Lao is also an important second language for...

and Vietnamese

Vietnamese language

are all major isolating languages spoken in mainland southeast Asia.

This typological structure

Linguistic typology

is also found in Africa. The Gbe languages

Gbe languages

The Gbe languages form a cluster of about twenty related languages stretching across the area between eastern Ghana and western Nigeria. The total number of speakers of Gbe languages is between four and eight million. The most widely spoken Gbe language is Ewe , followed by Fon...

, spoken in an area between eastern Ghana

Ghana

Ghana , officially the Republic of Ghana, is a country located in West Africa. It is bordered by Côte d'Ivoire to the west, Burkina Faso to the north, Togo to the east, and the Gulf of Guinea to the south...

and western Nigeria

Nigeria

Nigeria , officially the Federal Republic of Nigeria, is a federal constitutional republic comprising 36 states and its Federal Capital Territory, Abuja. The country is located in West Africa and shares land borders with the Republic of Benin in the west, Chad and Cameroon in the east, and Niger in...

, express many semantic features by lexical items. These languages have played a role in the genesis of several Caribbean creole languages, thus arguably forming a trans-Atlantic Sprachbund

Sprachbund

A Sprachbund – also known as a linguistic area, convergence area, diffusion area or language crossroads – is a group of languages that have become similar in some way because of geographical proximity and language contact. They may be genetically unrelated, or only distantly related...

Examples

Since in isolating languages words are not subject to morphology

Morphology (linguistics)

In linguistics, morphology is the identification, analysis and description, in a language, of the structure of morphemes and other linguistic units, such as words, affixes, parts of speech, intonation/stress, or implied context...

, and in analytic languages they are not marked with morphology showing their role in the sentence, word order tends to carry much importance. For example, Chinese makes use of word order to show subject–object relationships. Mandarin Chinese (of all varieties) is perhaps the best-known analytic language. To illustrate:



míngtiān	wǒ	de	péngyou	huì	wèi	wǒ	zuò	yí	ge	shēngri	dàngāo
tomorrow	I	(genitive particle Grammatical particle In grammar, a particle is a function word that does not belong to any of the inflected grammatical word classes . It is a catch-all term for a heterogeneous set of words and terms that lack a precise lexical definition... (='s Saxon genitive In English language teaching, the term "Saxon genitive" is used to associate the possessive use of the apostrophe with the historical origin in Anglo Saxon of the morpheme that it represents... ))	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

Bound morpheme

In morphology, a bound morpheme is a morpheme that only appears as part of a larger word; a free morpheme is one that can stand alone.Affixes are always bound. English language affixes are either prefixes or suffixes. E.g., -ment in "shipment" and pre- in "prefix"...

-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.

The two-syllable words in the Chinese sentence are actually two-morpheme words.
"tomorrow" = "next" + "day" (cf. "next year" ) "birthday" = "birth" + "day" (cf. lit. "previously born" [elder]: meaning "sir" or "Mister") "cake" = "egg" + "pastry" "friend" = "friend" + "companion"

- This is a case of using two words of similar meaning to differentiate between homophones. See Mandarin Chinese#Vocabulary.

However, the definition of a "word" in Chinese does not exactly match its definition in English. Each morpheme in Chinese is one syllable, distinguished from the average of twelve homonyms (in the vocabulary of a well-educated person) by its own unique logogram. The meanings of the individual morphemes are never forgotten, so any multi-syllable word can be analyzed as a compound word.

Verb aspect can also be implied with adverbs:



tā	men	zài	zuò	zuòyè
he	(plural)	(progressive aspect adverb)	do	homework.
"They are doing homework."

Similarly, in Burmese

Burmese language

, whose word order is subject–object–verb, sentence constructs are isolating.

	¹	²		³							³
məneʔpʰyà̃ ma ne' hpyan	tʃənɔ̀ kya no	ḭ i.	θəŋèdʒí̃ tha nge chin:	θì thi	mwéinḛi mwei: nei.	keiʔ mo̰ʊ̃ kei' moun.	tə ta	bá̃ ban:	pʰoʊʔ hpou'	péi pei:	myì myi
tomorrow	me	(subordinating particle)	friend	(subject particle)	birthday	cake	one	(classifier Burmese numerical classifiers In Burmese, measure words, in the form of particles, are used when counting or measuring nouns. They immediately follow the number, unless the number is a round number , in which case, the measure word precedes the number... )	bake	give	(future tense particle)
"Tomorrow my friend will bake a birthday cake for me."

¹ Pronoun generally used for males

² Literary form. Colloquial form uses .

³ Literary form. Colloquial form uses .

⁴ Literary form. Colloquial form uses .

Analytic languages

An analytic language is a language that conveys grammatical relationships syntactically

Syntax

In linguistics, syntax is the study of the principles and rules for constructing phrases and sentences in natural languages....

— that is, via the use of unbound morphemes, which are separate words, rather than via bound morpheme

Bound morpheme

s, which are inflection

Inflection

In grammar, inflection or inflexion is the modification of a word to express different grammatical categories such as tense, grammatical mood, grammatical voice, aspect, person, number, gender and case...

al prefixes, suffixes or infixes

Affix

. If a language is isolating, with only a single morpheme per word, then by necessity it must convey grammatical relationships analytically.

However, the reverse is not always true: for example, Mandarin Chinese can be argued to have many compound words, giving it a moderately high ratio of morphemes per word, yet since it does not use inflections to convey grammatical relationships it is an analytic language.

It is also possible that a language may have virtually no inflectional morphology but have a larger number of derivational

Derivation (linguistics)

In linguistics, derivation is the process of forming a new word on the basis of an existing word, e.g. happi-ness and un-happy from happy, or determination from determine...

affixes. For example, Indonesian has only two inflectional affixes but about 25 derivational morphemes. With only two inflectional affixes, Indonesian can be considered mostly analytic.

The term "analytic" is commonly used in a relative rather than an absolute sense. For example, English

English language

English is a West Germanic language that arose in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of England and spread into what was to become south-east Scotland under the influence of the Anglian medieval kingdom of Northumbria...

is less inflectional, and thus more nearly analytic, than most Indo-European languages. (For example, it uses "would go" whereas in Romance languages

Romance languages

The Romance languages are a branch of the Indo-European language family, more precisely of the Italic languages subfamily, comprising all the languages that descend from Vulgar Latin, the language of ancient Rome...

this would be expressed as a single inflected word; and it uses prepositions where most Slavic languages

Slavic languages

The Slavic languages , a group of closely related languages of the Slavic peoples and a subgroup of Indo-European languages, have speakers in most of Eastern Europe, in much of the Balkans, in parts of Central Europe, and in the northern part of Asia.-Branches:Scholars traditionally divide Slavic...

use declensional inflections). But English is also not totally analytic, because it does use inflections (for example, choose / chose / chosen / choosing); Mandarin Chinese has, e.g., "I go to store today.", "I go to store tomorrow.", "I go to store yesterday."

Explanation

Examples

Analytic languages

See also

Further reading