Wikipedia:Peer review/Inflected language/archive1
Items: Inflected language, Synthetic language
Discuss on: Talk:Inflected language, Talk:Synthetic language, Talk:Morphological typology
Description: Can't make heads or tails on whether they're the same or very different.
I find very little literature (on Wikipedia) giving an idea about what a inflected language is, but there are various descriptions of what a synthetic language is, and all different.
| Synthetic language | Morphological typology | Polysynthetic language |
|---|---|---|
| A synthetic language, also called an inflected language, is a language which uses inflectional forms, such as affixes, as a primary means of indicating the grammatical function of the words in the language, often to the point where the word order in a clause is arbitrary or merely connotative. An example of a synthetic language is Latin. | Synthetic languages are the most morphologically complex of the three types. The morphemes are often not separable from the root or base word. Sometimes the root word is completely indistinguishable and essentially 'disappears.' Word order is not important at all, as it is the morphemes that give the meaning of the words in the sentence. No matter what order you put the words in, the same meaning is held by each order. | A synthetic language is one that has more than one morpheme per word, and that covers most languages. |
IANAL (Linguist), but in my opinion, the description from morphological typology makes it look like fusional language.
The first description is undoubtedly the one used in classical Indo-European linguistics. The second seems better aplied to the limiting case than to the languages usually considered synthetic. The third definition carries its own destruction in its final clause. I should suggest that the first be used. Perhaps the third is attempting to define an agglutinative language? A. Shetsen 07:15, 6 Jul 2004 (UTC)