Although Vietnamese is quite often categorized as one of the rare examples of isolating languages, its modern form is actually not that isolating. Many words, especially of Sino-Vietnamese stock, are actually two-syllabic. Vietnamese though have the habit to shorten down words whenever they can, even when the words themselves are already short. Because of this a Vietnamese sentence can get really information-dense. In fact, Vietnamese even ranked first in the information density category, meaning the Vietnamese use far less syllables to get information across compared to, say, Japanese.
As a speaker of Armenian, I must emphasize that Armenian stands out as significantly more agglutinative and fusional compared to other Indo-European languages. In fact, many of our frequently used words tend to be quite lengthy. From my perspective, based on what I've seen, Germanic languages, especially the Nordic ones, can be considered the most analytical within the Indo-European family. It's interesting to note that sometimes, we tend to associate Indo-European grammar characteristics with only English/Germanic languages, when in reality, the Indo-European language family is very diverse, with some branches, like Armenian, displaying more fusional features.
Austronesian languages are a wash when it comes to typology, for me at least. Like OP said at the end of the video, most languages are a mix of most of the features nearby. Multilingualism affects it too - my family's speech is rife those niche agglutinations in English, and our Spanish is fairly analytic. I imagine even if I go from conversational to fluent in Tagalog or Indonesian, I'll probably still play with the grammar like this in those languages too. I can't imagine a population NOT doing this at least a little.
Analytic. Word ”makan” doesn’t change before persons or in some tenses, so that is suggesting that it’s isolating or analytic. But indonesian cannot be isolating because if you add „an” to ”makan„ it forms „makanan”. Indonesian sometimes make bigger words with smaller words, but don’t conjugate them
@@EchoLog Yes. X axis: Left from center - separating words Right from center - combining words Y axis: Above center - more declension Below center - less declension To simplify it, let’s make it 5 to 5 table. When y = 2 language has very complicated declension like, but if y = -2 declension is very simple. Aglutinative - top right corner Fusional - top left corner Polysynthetic - bottom right corner Isolating - bottom left corner Analythic are above between corners Examples: Indonesian - y-2/x1 - almost zero declension and small tendence to combing words. Hungarian y2/x2 - complicated declension and word combination Russian y2/x-1 - complicated declension and words are mostly seperated Chinese y-2/x-1 no declension and most words are separated.
I think while modern chinese while you can argue that its less isolating than its ancient fancier version "classical chinese" is still relatively isolated, most study I have seen rate Mandarin word to morpheme ratio about 0.92 to 0.95 which is still an extremely high amount which still lets people capable of creating sentences with 1 morpheme per meaning/word. Anyways, one interesting way for a language to become less analytic is the loss of meaning in words over time or it becomes generalized. A good example would be with mandarin 子, it still holds its own meaning which is "kid" but you would rarely find it standing alone because nowadays its used more like a suffix to create a noun or to mark individuality of a word thus creating a morpheme. It has become generalized due to its usage to create compound words Vietnamese is no exception either as many of its native words have gone out of use due to chinese influences. A good example would be the word "lòm" to mark an extreme degree of colour in a negative way as in đỏ lòm(etremely red), xanh lòm(extremely blue/green),... Whats interesting here is the word "lòm" is actually the native word for the liver, the word "gan" is actually a corrupted version of the chinese borrowing 肝(liver) which is read in vietnamese as can. So the term đỏ lòm actually means liver red aka extremely red Over time time the word "gan" has completely replaced "lòm", it only exists in the term "đỏ lòm" by the time the word has fallen out of use. And people started to assume it means extreme in a negative way and apply it to other colours, thus giving rise to the creation of the morpheme 'lòm' which is used to describe extreme degree of colour in a negative way. It has essentially lost its original meaning and become generalized. A lot of morphemes that become prefix or suffix have very interesting histories behind them, if possible, you should check it out
I would say that it's not really the case that the long words mentioned in English (like anti-dis-establish-ment-arian-ism) reflect historical differences, rather that derivational morphology is still much more productive than inflectional morphology. Derivational affixes don't provide additional grammatical information (although they can change the part of speech of a word), but inflectional affixes do. Instead, they alter the meaning of the word semantically. An interesting note is that many of these derivational affixes are Greek/Latin based (anti- and -ism being Greek, for example) and entered the language by scholars later, after English started becoming more analytic. The really long words you mentioned could be considered "niche" only because they have a really specific meaning from all the components put together. And I often find myself "inventing" new words in the sense of not being found in the dictionary, even though it's pretty clear what the meaning is from the components used.
just found your channel, very interesting and underrated content. love it! :) have you ever done a video about two languages that are commonly confused together? (i. e catalan and spanish, spanish and portuguese) it would be interesting to watch. perhaps videos like why polish uses the latin alphabet would be cool too
Some towns in Poland are betrayed, and the translation comes out strange, examples: Aleksandrów Łódzki (in short: Aleks) -> Aleksandrow Lodzki (in short: Alex) Konstantynów Łódzki (in short: Kanzas) -> Konstantinow Lodzki (in short: Kansas) But now translate Polish towns into English, examples: Cyców - Titsville (5 letters to 9 letters) Hel - Helium (3 to 6) So it's just not always worth translating if the word ends up being longer.
A few remarks about your first example viszontlátásra: 1. In literal translation it would be "To seeing [you] again" or "To meeting again". The German "auf Wiedersehen" has the exact same construction. I do not know if they are related. 2. It would be more correct to say that viszlát is the shortened version of viszontlátásra, as opposed to the latter being the long form of the first. Viszlát comes from viszontlátásra by dropping the end of the words viszont and látásra. 3. For the same reason, in this case the longer word does not carry more meaning. If anything, it's viszlát that has the extra layer of informality, and not viszontlátásra having the added formality. On another note, your argument about French becoming analytic seems backwards to me. They are not dropping sounds because they are changing to analytic, the language is being reclassified as analytic because they are dropping sounds.
Very enjoyable. Curious if you can recommend any source material on these (and related) topics? --Also curious: Where does Japanese come down on this spectrum?
Thank you! All the source material I used for this video is linked in the description if you want to check it out! Also, I believe Japanese lands in the agglutinative side of the spectrum. Their writing system shows there heavy emphasis on morpheme/consonant vowel chunks.
You should mention the Turkish. Because it can be so ridiculous.The longest surname in the Turkish is Ayyıldızlıkırmızıbayraktaşıyankahramanoğulları. If we want we can say Ayyıldızlıkırmızıbayraktaşıyankahramanoğullarındangillersizleştiricileştiriveremeyebileceklerimizdenmişsinizcesinedir. Meaning: As though you happen to have been from among those whom we will not be able to easily/quickly make a maker of Alyıldızlıkırmızıbayraktaşıyankahramanoğullarından family. If we exclude the surnames, the longest word in Turkish without suffixes is elektroensefalografi (electroencephalography). So if we use suffixes the word will become this: Elektroensefalografisizleştiricileştiriveremeyebileceklerimizdenmişsinizcesinedir. Meaning of this word: As though you happen to have been from among those whom we will not be able to easily/quickly make a maker of electroencephalography.
This video reminded me of the language file videos that Tom Scott used to do. He had a video about synthetic vs isolating languages and did a great job explaining them.
Also when people talk about long words, it's good to remember that how languages are written is quite arbitrary. As a native Finnish speaker I often hear how people are amazed by long Finnish words, and while in some cases they are interesting and carry more meaning than an English counterpart would, often they just are words that could literally be the same in English if the spelling rules for English and Finnish were the same. For example "ylioppilastutkintolautakunta" might seem long until you recognize that it's just literally "high school graduate examination board". In Finnish since ylioppilastutkintolautakunta means a single thing, it is written without spaces between the words. It's a word that is more than the sum of its parts. Mind you, the English word would be longer than the Finnish one if English used the same spelling rules: highschoolgraduateexaminationboard. Looks quite long doesn't it 😅
yeah, nowadays if you want to name something, especially if it's something like a scientific concept, you just slap prefixes and suffixes that relate to whatever you're talking about and that's the word. it's fun to see how long the words get but very unwieldy to actually use them
Maybe, that is an interesting idea. Not quite an answer but interesting to think about is that I think different accents of English are diverging in this regard. Take “y’all” vs “you guys”, “y’all” is moving toward the synthetic side of language whereas “you guys” is moving toward the isolating side.
Meanwhile, Polish language: Konstantynopolitańczykowianeczka (Literal Translation: Constantinopolitan Dance Girl, Fact Translate: Constantinopolitan Girl) Which means: Młoda Dziewczyna mieszkająca w Konstantynopolu (A young girl living in Constantinople)
The explanation of agglutinative vs fusional languages is a little bit all over the place. It'd would have been more concise to put it as 1 vs multiple pieces of information per morpheme or per affix.
I think that no. It's just components of ancient Greek and/or Latin words which are used that way as a scientific convention for making up new technical words, but usual Greek language itself doesn't work so much like that
I didn't expect to see epäjärjestelmällistyttämättömyydelläänaäkäänköhän in a language video. Fun fact: there is an even longer word in Finnish, invented by linguist Artturi Kannisto (known maybe for his studies of the Mansi language), which is meaningless nonsense but also interestingly evocative of actual words with an endless list of suffixes. It's kind of beautiful linguistic science dada: kumarreksituteskenteleentuvaisehkollaismaisekkuudellisenneskenteluttelemattomammuuksissansakaankopahan!
Although Vietnamese is quite often categorized as one of the rare examples of isolating languages, its modern form is actually not that isolating. Many words, especially of Sino-Vietnamese stock, are actually two-syllabic. Vietnamese though have the habit to shorten down words whenever they can, even when the words themselves are already short. Because of this a Vietnamese sentence can get really information-dense. In fact, Vietnamese even ranked first in the information density category, meaning the Vietnamese use far less syllables to get information across compared to, say, Japanese.
As a speaker of Armenian, I must emphasize that Armenian stands out as significantly more agglutinative and fusional compared to other Indo-European languages. In fact, many of our frequently used words tend to be quite lengthy. From my perspective, based on what I've seen, Germanic languages, especially the Nordic ones, can be considered the most analytical within the Indo-European family. It's interesting to note that sometimes, we tend to associate Indo-European grammar characteristics with only English/Germanic languages, when in reality, the Indo-European language family is very diverse, with some branches, like Armenian, displaying more fusional features.
So what's Indonesian? Analytic? Isolating?
i think its more agglutinative than english
Austronesian languages are a wash when it comes to typology, for me at least.
Like OP said at the end of the video, most languages are a mix of most of the features nearby. Multilingualism affects it too - my family's speech is rife those niche agglutinations in English, and our Spanish is fairly analytic.
I imagine even if I go from conversational to fluent in Tagalog or Indonesian, I'll probably still play with the grammar like this in those languages too. I can't imagine a population NOT doing this at least a little.
Analytic. Word ”makan” doesn’t change before persons or in some tenses, so that is suggesting that it’s isolating or analytic. But indonesian cannot be isolating because if you add „an” to ”makan„ it forms „makanan”. Indonesian sometimes make bigger words with smaller words, but don’t conjugate them
@@apodiktis your point makes me wonder if this typology stuff needs another axis or variable.
@@EchoLog Yes.
X axis:
Left from center - separating words
Right from center - combining words
Y axis:
Above center - more declension
Below center - less declension
To simplify it, let’s make it 5 to 5 table. When y = 2 language has very complicated declension like, but if y = -2 declension is very simple.
Aglutinative - top right corner
Fusional - top left corner
Polysynthetic - bottom right corner
Isolating - bottom left corner
Analythic are above between corners
Examples:
Indonesian - y-2/x1 - almost zero declension and small tendence to combing words.
Hungarian y2/x2 - complicated declension and word combination
Russian y2/x-1 - complicated declension and words are mostly seperated
Chinese y-2/x-1 no declension and most words are separated.
I think while modern chinese while you can argue that its less isolating than its ancient fancier version "classical chinese" is still relatively isolated, most study I have seen rate Mandarin word to morpheme ratio about 0.92 to 0.95 which is still an extremely high amount which still lets people capable of creating sentences with 1 morpheme per meaning/word.
Anyways, one interesting way for a language to become less analytic is the loss of meaning in words over time or it becomes generalized.
A good example would be with mandarin 子, it still holds its own meaning which is "kid" but you would rarely find it standing alone because nowadays its used more like a suffix to create a noun or to mark individuality of a word thus creating a morpheme. It has become generalized due to its usage to create compound words
Vietnamese is no exception either as many of its native words have gone out of use due to chinese influences. A good example would be the word "lòm" to mark an extreme degree of colour in a negative way as in đỏ lòm(etremely red), xanh lòm(extremely blue/green),...
Whats interesting here is the word "lòm" is actually the native word for the liver, the word "gan" is actually a corrupted version of the chinese borrowing 肝(liver) which is read in vietnamese as can. So the term đỏ lòm actually means liver red aka extremely red
Over time time the word "gan" has completely replaced "lòm", it only exists in the term "đỏ lòm" by the time the word has fallen out of use. And people started to assume it means extreme in a negative way and apply it to other colours, thus giving rise to the creation of the morpheme 'lòm' which is used to describe extreme degree of colour in a negative way. It has essentially lost its original meaning and become generalized.
A lot of morphemes that become prefix or suffix have very interesting histories behind them, if possible, you should check it out
acabei de descobrir esse canal e estou muito feliz com isso, canal muito interessante amigo
I would say that it's not really the case that the long words mentioned in English (like anti-dis-establish-ment-arian-ism) reflect historical differences, rather that derivational morphology is still much more productive than inflectional morphology. Derivational affixes don't provide additional grammatical information (although they can change the part of speech of a word), but inflectional affixes do. Instead, they alter the meaning of the word semantically.
An interesting note is that many of these derivational affixes are Greek/Latin based (anti- and -ism being Greek, for example) and entered the language by scholars later, after English started becoming more analytic. The really long words you mentioned could be considered "niche" only because they have a really specific meaning from all the components put together. And I often find myself "inventing" new words in the sense of not being found in the dictionary, even though it's pretty clear what the meaning is from the components used.
3:27 the morphemes here are not pharma + cology but pharmaco + logy
1:43
He knows what he's doing there.
just found your channel, very interesting and underrated content. love it! :) have you ever done a video about two languages that are commonly confused together? (i. e catalan and spanish, spanish and portuguese) it would be interesting to watch. perhaps videos like why polish uses the latin alphabet would be cool too
Thanks for the support! I'll look into your suggestions for a potential video in the future!
Some towns in Poland are betrayed, and the translation comes out strange, examples:
Aleksandrów Łódzki (in short: Aleks) -> Aleksandrow Lodzki (in short: Alex)
Konstantynów Łódzki (in short: Kanzas) -> Konstantinow Lodzki (in short: Kansas)
But now translate Polish towns into English, examples:
Cyców - Titsville (5 letters to 9 letters)
Hel - Helium (3 to 6)
So it's just not always worth translating if the word ends up being longer.
A few remarks about your first example viszontlátásra:
1. In literal translation it would be "To seeing [you] again" or "To meeting again". The German "auf Wiedersehen" has the exact same construction. I do not know if they are related.
2. It would be more correct to say that viszlát is the shortened version of viszontlátásra, as opposed to the latter being the long form of the first. Viszlát comes from viszontlátásra by dropping the end of the words viszont and látásra.
3. For the same reason, in this case the longer word does not carry more meaning. If anything, it's viszlát that has the extra layer of informality, and not viszontlátásra having the added formality.
On another note, your argument about French becoming analytic seems backwards to me. They are not dropping sounds because they are changing to analytic, the language is being reclassified as analytic because they are dropping sounds.
Does whether the language has prescriptive or descriptive spelling impact how likely it is to favour any particular form?
What an awesome little channel. Learning Japanese makes me wonder how Japanese fits into all of this. Great channel, can't wait to see more.
Thank you very much! I believe Japanese is agglutinative
Well done my man! Great research, super suiting for such videos voice and charisma. Thank you! Danke schön!
Very enjoyable. Curious if you can recommend any source material on these (and related) topics? --Also curious: Where does Japanese come down on this spectrum?
Thank you! All the source material I used for this video is linked in the description if you want to check it out! Also, I believe Japanese lands in the agglutinative side of the spectrum. Their writing system shows there heavy emphasis on morpheme/consonant vowel chunks.
Definitely agglutinative
You should mention the Turkish. Because it can be so ridiculous.The longest surname in the Turkish is Ayyıldızlıkırmızıbayraktaşıyankahramanoğulları. If we want we can say Ayyıldızlıkırmızıbayraktaşıyankahramanoğullarındangillersizleştiricileştiriveremeyebileceklerimizdenmişsinizcesinedir. Meaning: As though you happen to have been from among those whom we will not be able to easily/quickly make a maker of Alyıldızlıkırmızıbayraktaşıyankahramanoğullarından family.
If we exclude the surnames, the longest word in Turkish without suffixes is elektroensefalografi (electroencephalography). So if we use suffixes the word will become this: Elektroensefalografisizleştiricileştiriveremeyebileceklerimizdenmişsinizcesinedir. Meaning of this word: As though you happen to have been from among those whom we will not be able to easily/quickly make a maker of electroencephalography.
This video reminded me of the language file videos that Tom Scott used to do. He had a video about synthetic vs isolating languages and did a great job explaining them.
Also when people talk about long words, it's good to remember that how languages are written is quite arbitrary. As a native Finnish speaker I often hear how people are amazed by long Finnish words, and while in some cases they are interesting and carry more meaning than an English counterpart would, often they just are words that could literally be the same in English if the spelling rules for English and Finnish were the same. For example "ylioppilastutkintolautakunta" might seem long until you recognize that it's just literally "high school graduate examination board". In Finnish since ylioppilastutkintolautakunta means a single thing, it is written without spaces between the words. It's a word that is more than the sum of its parts. Mind you, the English word would be longer than the Finnish one if English used the same spelling rules: highschoolgraduateexaminationboard. Looks quite long doesn't it 😅
it is long long long because of the fog
the more the fog, the longer it is
simple
Very cool! Do you think English is becoming more polysynthentic because we are needing new words to describe new discoveries?
yeah, nowadays if you want to name something, especially if it's something like a scientific concept, you just slap prefixes and suffixes that relate to whatever you're talking about and that's the word. it's fun to see how long the words get but very unwieldy to actually use them
Maybe, that is an interesting idea. Not quite an answer but interesting to think about is that I think different accents of English are diverging in this regard. Take “y’all” vs “you guys”, “y’all” is moving toward the synthetic side of language whereas “you guys” is moving toward the isolating side.
0:46 It's spelled "viszlát", not vislát
Meanwhile, Polish language:
Konstantynopolitańczykowianeczka (Literal Translation: Constantinopolitan Dance Girl, Fact Translate: Constantinopolitan Girl)
Which means:
Młoda Dziewczyna mieszkająca w Konstantynopolu (A young girl living in Constantinople)
Polish is strongly agglutnative.
🔥
Indonesian (malay) is easy language. Is true or not ?
compared (Languages with official status)
bojler alado
The explanation of agglutinative vs fusional languages is a little bit all over the place. It'd would have been more concise to put it as 1 vs multiple pieces of information per morpheme or per affix.
Thanks for the feedback!
But the English examples of long words that you used are actually constructed from greek ones. So is Greek a synthetic language?
yes, I believe so
I think that no. It's just components of ancient Greek and/or Latin words which are used that way as a scientific convention for making up new technical words, but usual Greek language itself doesn't work so much like that
keep the good work up! even though im kind of a linguistics hater, your videos are interesting
Thanks, will do! If you don't mind me asking, what exactly makes you dislike linguistics?
I'm curious as well.
Viisisataaviisikymentaviisi
how about this for the most agglutinative language in the world. kalsarikännit.. when you get drunk back home only dressed in your underwear he he
I didn't expect to see epäjärjestelmällistyttämättömyydelläänaäkäänköhän in a language video. Fun fact: there is an even longer word in Finnish, invented by linguist Artturi Kannisto (known maybe for his studies of the Mansi language), which is meaningless nonsense but also interestingly evocative of actual words with an endless list of suffixes. It's kind of beautiful linguistic science dada: kumarreksituteskenteleentuvaisehkollaismaisekkuudellisenneskenteluttelemattomammuuksissansakaankopahan!