Re: polysynthetic languages

On Friday, September 19, 2003, at 12:09  PM, Tim May wrote:

> Dirk Elzinga wrote at 2003-09-19 10:47:55 (-0600)
>>
>  [explication of phonological processes allowing the identification of
>  word boundaries]
>>
>
> Incidentally, Dirk, what would _you_ consider the defining quality of
> a polysynthetic language?  Polypersonalism?  Certain types of
> object-incorporation?  One I read recently - an open class of bound
> morphemes?  Definitains like "sufficiently synthetic that a sentence
> may be a single word" have always struck me as inadequate, at least
> without further elaboration.  After all, a single verb can form a
> sentence in some highly isolating languages.
>
> I realize it may not be possible to give an absolutely final answer on
> this question, but what principle guides your own use of the term,
> generally speaking?
Impressionistic principles guide my use of the term 'polysynthetic.'
For me generally, if a verbal word contains content morphemes besides
the verbal root, that is an indication of a polysynthetic nature.
Joseph Greenberg proposed a simple way of quantifying the typological
cast of a language. I'll summarize for two of the categories he
discusses: (poly)synthesis and agglutination.

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+


The degree of agglutination in a language is expressed as a "ratio of
agglutinative constructions to morph junctures". Roughly, what is
involved is the degree of morphophonemic alternation found in an
utterance. An agglutinative construction is one in which both morphs
belong to morphemes which are automatic. A morpheme is automatic if its
morphs alternate in predictable fashion, or shows no alternation at all
(morph : morpheme :: phone : phoneme). So in the word 'leaves', there
are two morphs /liv-/ and /z/, both of which belong to morphemes which
alternate in completely predictable fashion (i.e., /liv-/ alternates
with /lif/ before the plural /z/; /z/ occurs when the noun stem does
not end in a voiceless consonant or a sibilant). If alternations are
not automatic, the agglutinative index will go down. Here are
Greenberg's figures for the same languages:

Eskimo: 0.03
Sanskrit: 0.09
Anglo-Saxon: 0.11
English: 0.30
Farsi: 0.34
Yakut: 0.51
Swahili: 0.67
Vietnamese: ...

Vietnamese doesn't rate since there are next to no junctures within
words. Notice that Eskimo has the lowest degree of agglutination, and
Swahili the highest. Apparently there are more non-automatic
morphophonemic alternations going on in Eskimo than in the other
languages included by Greenberg. He proposes that languages which have
an index above 0.50 be called 'agglutinative'.

> (I am prompted to ask this by a recent reading of Jacques Guy's
> postings on sci.lang.  It appears that he considers French to be
> agglutinative but not polysynthetic, and remarks on the extreme rarity
> of polysynthetic languages outside the Americas.  It seems to me that
> this depends on where you draw the line, which I've never been certain
> of.  And you're the logical person to ask.)
I don't work professionally with polysynthetic languages, at least I
don't think I do. The Uto-Aztecan languages are impressionistically
simpler than Eskimo (for example), and the one UA language taken by
many to be polysynthetic, Nahuatl, doesn't strike me as being
particularly so. But I haven't run the numbers à la Greenberg to see if
that's the case.

By contrast, my constructed language Miapimoquitch is polysynthetic to
roughly the same degree as Salishan languages are (perhaps a bit less).
Again, I'd need to run the numbers and see.

Dirk
--
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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