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It’s not great. There are ~2 broad categories of language based on their use of affixes: analytic (which doesn’t make much use of affixes, instead relying on wo
by dmn322 3y ago
It’s not great. There are ~2 broad categories of language based on their use of affixes: analytic (which doesn’t make much use of affixes, instead relying on word order), and synthetic (which does use affixes). Synthetic has multiple sub-categories depending on how the affixes are used.
This approach completely ignores analytic languages which put their complexity in word order instead of affixes, and it ignores the distinctions within synthetic languages such as agglutinating, which stacks up affixes vs fusional, which combines multiple affixes into a single new affix.
It also misinterprets what people mean when they say languages which collide “reduce complexity” which really means they tend to become more analytic. Nobody expected the Scandinavian languages to have this characteristic because they’ve been in the process of diverging from a common language.
The process they’re referencing applies to languages which come from the collision of distinct languages, such as pidgins and creoles. The hypothesized tendency is for languages which have had consistent boundaries and populations for a long period of time to be more agglutinating then eventually fusional, and eventually polysynthetic like some Native American languages, where a single word can be translated to a complete sentence in English for instance
Edit: corrected for distinction between fusional and synthetic
- mcswell 3y agoThere's another category between analytic (no affixes) and agglutinating (potentially multiple affixes on a single word), namely inflectional (usually one affix per word). Many IndoEuropean languages like Spanish, German and to some extent English fall into that class, although there are nuances. Spanish verbs generally have a single suffix that encodes person, number, tense and mood, but you could analyze the Spanish future tense as having a future suffix followed by a person/ number suffix.
- pezezin 3y ago> but you could analyze the Spanish future tense as having a future suffix followed by a person/ number suffix. The Spanish future tense is actually the infinitive plus the present simple of the auxiliary verb "haber". It started as a composite form, much like English "will + infinitive", but at some point it merged into a single form. For example: "He de comer" (I must eat) -> "Comer he" (I will eat) -> "Comeré" (I will eat) Note: the first form is still in use in the modern language, but the intermediate form sounds really archaic.
- seo-speedwagon 3y agoThanks for the explanation. I think that’s why the whole thing feels kind of … unserious? Like in Japanese a whole sentence like “I didn’t eat” could be one long “word” (食べませんでした) but who’s to say it’s more complex than English? If you wanted to play devil’s advocate you could make an argument that analytic languages have their own complexity, for example Yoda-ese (“eat I did not”) which is intelligible but distinctly unnatural to an English speaker