The vast number of existing or ever existing languages inevitably needs to be classified, one of which is the division of languages into synthetic and analytical. Although the existence of these two types is generally recognized, the criteria that served as the basis for such a classification are still under discussion. This is due to the fact that the analyticity or syntheticity of a language can be deduced from both morphological and syntactic considerations.
Morphology
This branch of linguistics studies the grammatical forms of words. There are two main strategies for their formation: the use of various morphemes (prefixes, affixes and inflections) or auxiliary words. The ratio between the number of morphemes and the number of meaningful words in an arbitrarily chosen segment of the text shows the index of language synthesis. The American linguist Joseph Greenberg calculated this ratio. For Vietnameseit is 1.06 (that is, only 106 morphemes were found in a segment of text 100 words long), and for English it is 1.68. In Russian, the index of syntheticity ranges from 2.33 to 2.45.
Grinberg's method for establishing the difference between analytic and synthetic languages is called quantitative. He assumes that all languages with a synthetic index from 2 to 3 can be classified as synthetic. Languages for which the index is less are analytic.
Syntax
The absence of a morphological indicator of the word form requires a stricter word order, which allows you to establish grammatical relationships between lexemes. Already from the name itself, it is possible to determine which languages are called languages of the analytical system: in order to understand what is at stake, you need to conduct some analysis of the statement, to determine what refers to what. In addition to the rigid word order, it is necessary to pay attention to intonation. If, for example, in English interrogative sentences are introduced using function words, then in Russian it is possible to establish differences only with the help of intonation (for example, "Mom has come" and "Mom has come?").
Grammar
Syntactic and morphological principles of singling out analytical and synthetic languages cannot be considered separately. It is necessary to take into account the grammatical structure of the language as a whole, since the boundary between the two types of information transfer often looks unsteady. If inWith regard to English, we can confidently say that this is the language of the analytical system (the endings - (e) s, - (e) d, -ing - that's, perhaps, all that is immediately remembered from English morphemes), then with Russian the situation is more complicated: we we see both the active use of inflections (for example, case endings) and auxiliary verbs (in the formation of the future tense of imperfective verbs). A similar situation is observed in other synthetic languages. Like morphology, syntax is just one of many aspects of grammar. And these two sections of linguistics are closely related. Therefore, the difference in the languages of the analytical and synthetic systems can only be established from the standpoint of a comprehensive study of grammar.
Article
An example is the development of articles. In the vast majority of languages, the indefinite article develops from the cardinal numeral "one", and the definite article develops from the demonstrative pronoun. Initially, it plays a syntactic role: it shows whether the subject is known or unknown to the listener. But gradually the article also acquires a morphological role, showing the gender, number, and sometimes even the case of the noun. This is especially evident in the German language, where the article, as a function word, shows the morphological characteristics of the noun, but at the same time it changes, adding various inflections. Given this feature, is German a synthetic or analytical language? The answer requires the study of grammar in its totality. Greenberg Index for Germandemonstrates its borderline position: 1, 97.
Language in development
The development of comparative linguistics allowed linguists to formulate the principles of language reconstruction, thanks to which one can get acquainted with the grammatical structure of pre-written languages. Thanks to this, it is known that the connections between the words of the Proto-Indo-European language were expressed by adding various morphemes. In written languages, the same situation is observed: Latin is clearly a synthetic language, but English or French that arose from it is now considered analytical.
Phonetics
The simplest explanation for this is a change in phonetic order. Already at the stage of late Latin, inflections, expressed mainly in vowel sounds, begin to be pronounced indistinctly, which leads to the unification of morphological forms. Therefore, there is a need for additional marking of grammatical connections: prepositions, auxiliary verbs and the rapidly developing category of the article are becoming increasingly important. One can often come across the erroneous assertion that the English language has simply lost all cases, except for the nominative (Subjective Case) and the possessive (Possessive Case), which arose on the basis of the genitive. Sometimes the accusative case (Objective Case) is also distinguished. But what actually happened was not the extinction of the cases of the Old English language, but their merger. The current common case in English has retained the forms of both the ancient nominative and dative cases.
From analysis to synthesis
There is also a reverse process. The future tense of the Latin language was formed synthetically, but with a change in the pronunciation of all its forms, they began to sound the same. As already mentioned, in this case, the grammar adapts to this process, allowing the use of forms of the verb habere as auxiliary. This feature has passed into the emerging Romance languages, but its evolution at first glance looks unexpected. In Spanish, the forms of the verb haber became the endings of the Futuro Simple de Indicativo tense, merging with the stem of the infinitive. As a result, the forms of the future tense, beloved (for their simplicity) by every Spanish language learner, arose: comeré, comerás, comerá, comeremos, comeréis, comerán, in which the endings are -é, -ás, -á, -emos, -éis, -án testify that once this tense was formed with the help of an auxiliary verb. Here it is appropriate to recall the significance of stress and intonation for distinguishing forms: the Futuro Simple de Subjuntivo form is formed with the same, but only unstressed endings.
Varieties of synthetic languages
Before, we mainly talked about synthetic languages of this type, where the main tool for shaping is inflection. It should be noted that such a strategy just requires the use of various functional words to clarify grammatical connections. For example, the Russian word "dom" has a zero ending, which is characteristic of both the nominative and accusative cases. Therefore, to demonstrate that "house" is not a subject, but an objectactions, the use of various prepositions is required.
In inflectional languages, one inflection does not have a specific morphological meaning. The ending -a in Russian can express:
- nominative singular nouns of the 1st declension;
- genitive singular nouns of the 2nd declension (and for animate ones also accusative);
- nominative plural of some masculine and neuter nouns;
- feminine in the past tense of verbs.
But the ways of marking grammatical connections in synthetic languages are not limited to inflection. There are agglutinative languages in which word forms are created by sequentially adding various suffixes and prefixes, which have only one grammatical meaning. For example, in Hungarian, the suffix -nak- expresses only the meaning of the dative case, while -aren- in Basque expresses the genitive case.
Examples of synthetic languages
The most striking examples of expressing grammatical relationships using inflections can boast of Latin (especially the classical period), ancient Greek and Sanskrit. Some languages on this basis are distinguished as polysynthetic, where the use of function words and auxiliary verbs is practically not found. Such languages make up entire families, such as Chukchi-Kamchatka or Eskimo-Aleut.
Separately, it should be said about the Slavic languages. The problem of classifying the Russian language as a synthetic or analytical type was mentioned above. Its development is characterized by a consistent blurring of the system of verb tenses (only the present, some forms of the past and future remained from Old Church Slavonic), while maintaining a branched system of declension of nominal parts of speech. Nevertheless, it can be said with a certain degree of certainty that the literary Russian language is synthetic. In some dialectisms, there is an expansion of analyticism, expressed in the formation of perfect forms of verb tenses (for example, "I have milked a cow" instead of "I have milked a cow", where the construction "at me" corresponds to the verb of possession "to have" used in the construction of perfect forms).
The same situation is observed in other Slavic languages with the exception of Bulgarian. This is the only Slavic language in which the inflectional strategy of declension of nominal parts of speech disappeared and the article was formed. However, some tendencies towards the appearance of the article are observed in Czech, where the demonstrative pronoun ten and its forms for other genders precede the noun in order to indicate its familiarity to the listener.
