A report on Morphological typology

A trilingual plaque displaying members of all three major morphological alignments: analytic (English), fusional (French), and agglutinative (Plains Cree)
"I speak Vietnamese" in Vietnamese. Note the tonal, single-syllable nature of the words; this is frequent in analytic languages, i.e. ones in which there is little to no inflection and words stand on their own.
Polish noun declension collapses several factors into one ending: number (only plural is shown), gender, animacy, and case.
A plaque in Chechen, an agglutinative language.
The rigidly defined, analytic words of Lojban make the language useful for describing logic – in this case, discrete mathematics.
A clock face has been used as a metaphor for the evolution amongst analytic, agglutinative and fusional states

Way of classifying the languages of the world that groups languages according to their common morphological structures.

- Morphological typology
A trilingual plaque displaying members of all three major morphological alignments: analytic (English), fusional (French), and agglutinative (Plains Cree)

5 related topics with Alpha

Overall
Morpheme-based morphology tree of the word "independently"

Morphology (linguistics)

0 links

Study of words, how they are formed, and their relationship to other words in the same language.

Study of words, how they are formed, and their relationship to other words in the same language.

Morpheme-based morphology tree of the word "independently"

Morphology differs from morphological typology, which is the classification of languages based on their use of words, and lexicology, which is the study of words and how they make up a language's vocabulary.

Polysynthetic language

0 links

In linguistic typology, polysynthetic languages, formerly holophrastic languages, are highly synthetic languages, i.e. languages in which words are composed of many morphemes (word parts that have independent meaning but may or may not be able to stand alone).

Friedrich Schlegel in 1801

Friedrich Schlegel

0 links

German poet, literary critic, philosopher, philologist, and Indologist.

German poet, literary critic, philosopher, philologist, and Indologist.

Friedrich Schlegel in 1801
The unfinished Cologne cathedral (1856) with medieval crane on the south tower
Schlegel's grave at the Old Catholic Cemetery, Dresden
Dorothea von Schlegel (1790) by Anton Graff

The first to notice what became known as Grimm's law, Schlegel was a pioneer in Indo-European studies, comparative linguistics, and morphological typology, publishing in 1819 the first theory linking the Indo-Iranian and German languages under the Aryan group.

Areas in Southern Sweden with a Finnish-speaking population (2005)

Finnish language

0 links

Uralic language of the Finnic branch, spoken by the majority of the population in Finland and by ethnic Finns outside of Finland.

Uralic language of the Finnic branch, spoken by the majority of the population in Finland and by ethnic Finns outside of Finland.

Areas in Southern Sweden with a Finnish-speaking population (2005)
Birch bark letter no. 292 is the oldest known document in any Finnic language.
Mikael Agricola, a 19th-century drawing by Albert Edelfelt
Elias Lönnrot as depicted in a 19th-century caricature – Lönnrot made several journeys to Karelia and Eastern Finland to collect folklore, from which he compiled the Kalevala.
Map of Finnish dialects and forms of speech
The Turku dialect is famous for its seemingly inverted questions. For example, "Ei me mittä kaffelle men?" looks like it means "So we don't go for coffees?" but actually means "Shall we go for coffees?"
A sign in Savonian dialect: "You don't get cognac here, but proper wheat made buns and good strong Juhla Mokka-brand coffee you will have. Welcome."
Example of a participle construction
Suomalaisen Sana-Lugun Coetus (1745) by Daniel Juslenius was the first comprehensive dictionary of the Finnish language with 16,000 entries.
The first page of Abckiria (1543), the first book written in the Finnish language. The spelling of Finnish in the book had many inconsistencies: for example, the sound could be represented by c, k or even g; the long u and the long i were represented by w and ij respectively, and ä was represented by e.

Finnish is typologically agglutinative and uses almost exclusively suffixal affixation.

Examples of written Navajo on public signs. Clockwise from top left: Student Services Building, Diné College; cougar exhibit, Navajo Nation Zoo; shopping center near Navajo, New Mexico; notice of reserved parking, Window Rock

Navajo language

0 links

Southern Athabaskan language of the Na-Dené family, through which it is related to languages spoken across the western areas of North America.

Southern Athabaskan language of the Na-Dené family, through which it is related to languages spoken across the western areas of North America.

Examples of written Navajo on public signs. Clockwise from top left: Student Services Building, Diné College; cougar exhibit, Navajo Nation Zoo; shopping center near Navajo, New Mexico; notice of reserved parking, Window Rock
General Clayton Barney Vogel's recommendation letter for Navajo to be used by code talkers during World War II
Standard ASCII (top) and Unicode (bottom) keyboards for Navajo

Navajo is difficult to classify in terms of broad morphological typology: it relies heavily on affixes—mainly prefixes—like agglutinative languages, but these affixes are joined in unpredictable, overlapping ways that make them difficult to segment, a trait of fusional languages.