Re: polysynthetic languages

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+
My lang appears to be at 4.5 although the source I used is rather poor as it
is mostly sample words that so the principles of my lang and most of them
are a word long. If I used a regular text, it would probably be lower, much
closer to 4.