A synthetic language is a language which is statistically characterized by a higher morpheme-to-word ratio. In contrast to analytic languages, which break up concepts into separate words, synthetic languages combine (synthesize) them into a single word. Syntactic roles embodied by a word, such as a subject or an object, are assigned by adding affixes (characteristic for fusional languages, a subtype of synthetic languages). In the present-day English, once a fusional language, only a few remnants of its fusional origin are retained: for example, the role of an object is assigned to the word "who" by adding affix "m" to it (resulting in "whom"); tense is assigned by adding -ed and -ing to a verb; a possessive role is assigned by adding an apostrophe and 's' to it; by adding affix -er either a comparative form is assigned (resulting in faster) or verb is turned into a noun (teach-er). Analytic languages predominantly use auxiliary verbs and word order.
Combining two or more morphemes into one word is used in agglutinating languages, instead. Subsubcategories include polysynthetic languages (most of them in an agglutinative subcategory, with an exception of Navajo and other Athabaskan languages that are often categorized as fusional), and oligosynthetic languages (only found in constructed languages).
Derivational vs relational
Derivational and relational synthesis represent opposite ends of a spectrum. In derivational synthesis, various whole nouns, verbs, and affixes are combined to create new words with distinct concrete meanings. On the other hand, relational synthesis involves attaching affixes to a root word to assign it a syntactic role within a sentence. A single root can participate in both types of synthesis, each occurring with varying frequencies.
Derivational synthesis examples
The morphemes being synthesized in the following examples either belong to a particular grammatical class – such as adjectives, nouns, or prepositions – or are affixes that usually have a single form and meaning: English derivational synthesis example
German derivational synthesis
Greek derivational synthesis
Polish derivational synthesis
Russian derivational synthesis
Malayalam derivational synthesis
() "such/so + not + has + been + when + occasions + all + exclusively" "on all such occasions when it has been not so" Persian derivational synthesis
Ukrainian derivational synthesis
international classical compounds based on Greek and Latin derivational synthesis
alternately, cholesterol can be read as chole- + () + -ol, as in "bile + solid + [alcohol suffix]", or "the solid alcohol present in bile".
Relational synthesis
In relational synthesis, root words are joined to bound morphemes to show grammatical function. In other words, it involves the combination of more abstract units of meaning than derivational synthesis. In the following examples many of the morphemes are related to voice (e.g. passive voice), whether a word is in the subject or object of the sentence, possession, plurality, or other abstract distinctions in a language:
Italian
Spanish
Nahuatl
Latin
Albanian
"give + to me + it[singular] + you[plural] + [imperative mood]" 'You, give it to me' Japanese
Finnish
Hungarian
Turkish
Georgian
The word describes the whole sentence that incorporates tense, subject, object, relation between them, direction of the action, conditional and causative markers etc.
Types of synthetic languages
Agglutinating languages
Agglutinating languages have a high rate of agglutination in their words and sentences, meaning that the morphological construction of words consists of distinct morphemes that usually carry a single unique meaning. These morphemes tend to look the same no matter what word they are in, so it is easy to separate a word into its individual morphemes. Morphemes may be bound (that is, they must be attached to a word to have meaning, like affixes) or free (they can stand alone and still have meaning).
Swahili is an agglutinating language. For example, distinct morphemes are used in the conjugation of verbs: Ni-na-soma: I-present-read or I am reading U-na-soma: you-present-read or you are reading A-na-soma: s/he-present-read or s/he is reading
Fusional languages
In fusional languages, short morphemes (for example, inflectional affixes) tend to denote several different syntactic roles assigned to a root word they are attached to. Also, they tend to be fused together so that it is difficult to separate individual morphemes from one another.
