Re: polysynthetic languages

Hey.

This weekend I ran the numbers on Tepa, the precursor to Miapimoquitch,
to find the average morpheme density (=synthesis index). I was not
particularly surprised to find a synthesis index of 2.68 (=morphemes
per word). I had a total of 369 words spread unequally among three
texts (208, 63, 98). The figures for the individual texts are: 2.80
(582/208), 2.65 (167/63), and 2.45 (240/98). So Tepa shows about the
same morpheme density as Southern Paiute, which I calculated at 2.65 on
the basis of the text found in Sapir's 1930 grammar.

I didn't try to find the synthesis index for Miapimoquitch since I
don't have a sample text of "sufficient size" yet, but I would be
surprised if it wasn't higher than Tepa.

Dirk

On Friday, September 19, 2003, at 04:42  PM, Dirk Elzinga wrote:

> To discover the degree of synthesis present in a language, take a
> sample text of sufficient size. For each word of the text, count the
> number of morphemes. (The term 'morpheme' is defined by Greenberg as
> the minimum meaningful sequence of phonemes in a language.) The
> synthetic index will be the average number of morphemes per word. The
> higher the number, the more synthetic the language. Greenberg gives the
> following figures for various languages:
>
> Eskimo: 3.72
> Sanskrit: 2.59
> Swahili: 2.55
> Yakut: 2.17
> Anglo-Saxon: 2.12
> English: 1.68
> Farsi: 1.52
> Vietnamese: 1.06
>
> Eskimo, which is usually held to be polysynthetic, has the highest
> synthesis index. Vietnamese, which is usally held to isolating, has the
> lowest. Greenberg proposes ranges which roughly coincide with
> impressionistic categorizations of languages:
>
> analytic: 1.00-1.99
> synthetic: 2.00-2.99
> polysynthetic: 3.00+
--
Dirk Elzinga
Dirk_Elzinga@byu.edu

"I believe that phonology is superior to music. It is more variable and
its pecuniary possibilities are far greater." - Erik Satie

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