Comment by pjlegato | Hacker News Reader

Comment by pjlegato | Hacker News Reader

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Linguists refer to these traits you're describing by classifying languages as being more or less "synthetic" or "analytic."[1] Broadly speaking, synthetic languages tend to encode information by modifying words (e.g. the articles "der" vs "dem" in German); analytic languages tend to encode information via adding words and word order (e.g. "the" versus "to the" in English.)

Real languages exist somewhere on a spectrum. Languages in the Indo-European family show an empirical historical tendency to become less synthetic and more analytic over time and via contact with other languages. German is more synthetic than English, but less synthetic than Russian, and much less synthetic than very old IE languages such as Vedic Sanskrit. English is more analytic than German, but less analytic and more synthetic than Afrikaans. Some non-IE languages such as Finnish are extremely synthetic.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synthetic_language , https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analytic_language

Excellent, that's precisely the pointer I was looking for. Thanks!

Your comment and the linked Wikipedia pages has challenged my understanding of my native language, Afrikaans.

Based on the description I would classify Afrikaans as synthetic, not analytic.

Afrikaans has an origin as a pidgin Dutch spoken by slaves and other lower classes. Afrikaans speakers can communicate effortlessly with Dutch and Flemish speakers for example. Our grammar is decidedly germanic and we make use of morphemes in stead of separate words.

Held: hero Heldjie: diminutive hero Helde: plural

Heldin: female hero Heldinnetjie: diminutive female hero Heldinne: plural

Although it should be noted that explicit female versions of nouns is falling out of favour to some degree.

According to what I've read (which could very well not be representative of the language as it's spoken by your community), grammatical gender (which Dutch still has) is largely dead in Afrikaans. There is no case system present in Afrikaans. Much like in English, you wouldn't modify the article of the word because that word is part of some innate class ("gender") of nouns. Die held, die heldin, die helde, etc. In German, you would have der Held (hero), die Heldin (heroine), die Helden (heroes)/die Heldinnen (heroines), and those articles would change depending on the noun's role in the sentence (ie "der Held" -> "dem Helden", if the hero is the one receiving something in a sentence).

English and Afrikaans still have remnants of grammatical gender and case, but it's not really enough to be considered a prominent feature of the language.

It's a question of relative positioning along spectrum, not a binary state. Real languages are not "synthetic" or "analytic" in an absolute sense. They are "more synthetic than this other language" or "more analytic than this other language."

Does this mean that languages become more synthetic if they're left on their own? Did Latin and Sanskrit develop in greater isolation? This is a fascinating subject.

The general categorical answer to that question is not known. Some linguists think it might be so, others disagree.

Within the Indo-European family that includes Latin and Sanskrit, the empirical historical process seems to have been that the Proto-Indo-European language was highly synthetic, and as time went on, less synthetic daughter languages such as Latin and Sanskrit developed from it by degrees. These in turn gradually developed by degrees into even less synthetic / more analytic daughter languages (Italian, Hindi, etc.)

Why this happened is an open theoretical question. Pidginization (which would roughly correspond to 'lack of isolation'), and/or phonetic changes that impacted discernment of synthetic features are leading candidates.

How does Mandarin compare on that scale

It's a stereotypically analytic language.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analytic_language

>>For example, Mandarin Chinese has many compound words, giving it a moderately high ratio of morphemes per word, but since it has almost no inflectional affixes at all to convey grammatical relationships, it is a very analytic language.

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