Talk:Isolating language

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Criticism

Of the hundreds of Wikipedia articles I have read, this is by far the most difficult to understand. Only a linguist would have any hope of comprehending it. A typical Wikipedia reader like me has no hope. Ronstew 03:13, 2 December 2007 (UTC)

Perhaps illustrations in English-based pidgins, which (I gather) are essentially isolating, would make it more accessible. —Tamfang (talk) 19:08, 2 May 2009 (UTC)

Analytic/isolating confusion

This article and the article on isolating languages, claim that analytic languages are languages where meaning is more affected by word order and particles than by inflection, while isolating languages have few affixes, declensions, et cetera, and mostly consist of separate words. However, everywhere else on Wikipedia, it seems like it is analytic languages that consist mostly of separate words. I don't know the difference, so I posted an "expert" tag. Let's hope some professional linguist is able to sort this out.

A. Parrot (talk) 23:49, 29 April 2008 (UTC)

English is the exception and not the rule: usually to be an analytic language, it will also happen to be an isolating language. So much so that english is only (occasionally) included with the isolating languages because it is syntactically analytic, and has auxilliaries for future and conditionals ... otherwise it is a weakly inflected language with a relative wealth of compound words and therefore opposite of an isolating language. Oh, btw, I'm not an expert I'm just parroting what my chinese friends and friends in language education have told me. — robbiemuffin ^{page talk} 17:08, 30 May 2008 (UTC)

As a student of linguistics, I've learnt the opposite!

+ isolating languages are one-morpheme-per-word (Mandarin Chinese being the prime example)

+ analytic languages may have more (English being an example of such)

Has the expert come by?

– Penelope why (talk) 13:50, 25 July 2015 (UTC)

Khmer isn't a great example of an isolating language

Most words are only one morpheme, but its common to derive new words from roots. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 151.201.149.46 (talk) 23:03, 21 November 2008 (UTC)

Affixes in Khmer changes the class of words or intensify an action. It does not carry any grammatical information like plurality. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 151.201.149.150 (talk) 23:05, 21 May 2009 (UTC)

Chinese

Isn't the current example of Chinese slightly odd? "明天我的朋友会为我一个蛋糕": 会 as "will" is redundant as the time of the action has already been specified, and I believe 为 as "for" is a little strange for this sentence. Wouldn't something like "明天我的朋友给我做一个蛋糕" be a better construction? 213.100.32.24 (talk) 08:28, 29 April 2009 (UTC)

• Not a better construction. 「會」 specify the action is going to be performed in the furure, while 「明天」 is additional information telling you when. Note that I say it's "extra" information. No matter if you add 「明天」 or not, the 「會」 is still needed.Ljgshkg (talk) 19:15, 29 April 2009 (UTC)

• 「為」does mean "for". Without putting much thought, I can replace this word with 「給」or「替」. They each mean a little different, and which to use depends on what you really mean. 「為」 is a correct word to use in certain situations when you want to stress the "for". That'll depends on the "why" performing the action. Ljgshkg (talk) 19:15, 29 April 2009 (UTC)

Mandarin Chinese is an analytic language, not an isolating language

Isolating languages have close to 1 morpheme per word. Most Mandarin words have multiple morphemes that are not, on their own, independent words, so it is not isolating. However, Chinese qualifies as an analytic language because uses not inflection, but other words (grammatical particles) to express syntactic relationships. Classical Chinese is isolating, not modern Mandarin.

There is incorrect and misleading information here, and should be removed: "However, the definition of a "word" in Chinese does not exactly match its definition in English. Each morpheme in Chinese is one syllable, distinguished from the average of twelve homonyms (in the vocabulary of a well-educated person) by its own unique logogram. The meanings of the individual morphemes are never forgotten, so any multi-syllable word can be analyzed as a compound word."

Only words composed of only free morphemes are compounds. The 明 in 明天 is not a free morpheme. Neither 朋 nor 友 are free morphemes. They are not compounds.

From The morphology of Chinese: a linguistic and cognitive approach by Jerome Packard:

"Free words may serve as word components in Chinese just as they may in most other languages. Words composed in this way are defined in western linguistics as ‘true compounds’. If we follow this definition, then, strictly speaking, the majority of bisyllabic words in Chinese should not be called ‘compounds’ because one or both of the constituents of most complex Chinese words are bound roots rather than free words.

Why has there been confusion on this issue of ‘compound’ in Chinese linguistics? It is largely a matter of conflicting terminology. In Chinese, the early label for ‘two-syllable words’ was fùhé cí compound-word ‘compounded word’, because they were indeed words that were formed through the combination of morphemes as implied by the term fùhé ‘compound’. This term lent itself rather nicely to the English translation ‘compound word’, even though strictly speaking (at least according to the definition common in western linguistics) the term ‘compound’ is restricted to words formed from two free words.¹⁹ This, then, is the reason for the terminological confusion: if compounds are indeed to be defined as words that are composed from other words, then most Chinese ‘fùhé cí’ are not compounds: they are, rather, ‘bound root words’."

References

Analytic redirect

I came here as a redirect from "analytic language". I'm wondering if that redirect is appropriate, since this article is about an extreme case of analytic languages, and assumes that the reader knows what analytic languages are. Is there a reason that "analytic language" can't have its own article? If there is, then maybe the lead should be reworked so that it handles those readers who come through the analytic redirect. If not, then maybe analytic should be branched off into its own article. (I'd do this myself... except I know nothing about the topic! Just thought I'd bring it to the attention of more knowledgeable editors.) – DroEsperanto^{(t / c)} 01:57, 27 July 2009 (UTC)

Burmese examples

I find the Burmese examples do not show Burmese script, no matter which encoding I choose for viewing the article. Since I have many more than the average number of East Asian languages and fonts installed on my PC, I expect this problem would be widespread. Therefore it would be desirable if somebody with access to the correct fonts and characters could make a graphic version of the text, for display for (I suspect) the majority of readers.

yoyo (talk) 17:07, 26 January 2010 (UTC)

English

Is "birthday" really only one morpheme, even though it is a compound word? Also, what about English words like "anti-conservationist" composed of multiple semantic parts? I'm not doubting the linguistics here, I'm just pointing out questions that occur to a non-linguist like me and that don't seem to be addressed here.

- TheFriendlyGod —Preceding unsigned comment added by 74.88.39.41 (talk) 15:58, 9 May 2010 (UTC)

Is the term "analytic" borrowed from mathematics and in some sense analogous to the mathematical term?--Jrm2007 (talk) 17:42, 16 May 2010 (UTC)

Error in Mandarin

From the Analytical Languages section: Mandarin Chinese has, e.g., "I go to store today.", "I go to store tomorrow.", "I go to store yesterday."

This would be better written "Today, I go to store.", "Tomorrow, I go to store.", Yesterday I go to store." It sounds very awkward to move these kinds of time-words to the back as we often do in English. They should be in front. There are other examples given with this kind of word order in other sections of this article.

If this is noticable to me, with my broken Madarin and mere 12 credit hours in Linguistics, it must be irritating to those with real skills. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 68.99.174.26 (talk) 06:18, 10 March 2012 (UTC)

Not to mention your broken English. ""Today, I go to store.", "Tomorrow, I go to store.", " indeed!

David Lloyd-Jones (talk) 17:25, 5 March 2014 (UTC)

Are you joking? 178.39.122.125 (talk) 03:41, 29 September 2016 (UTC)

Yeah, I thought the OP was doing a transliteration. Can someone who speaks Mandarin help out? --Bluejay Young (talk) 08:47, 1 October 2016 (UTC)

Scalar categories, new article on analytic languages

This article used language that clearly identified languages as being in such and such category, even though linguists today stress that these are more like continuous axes: "[s]imilarly, in the synthetic language Russian, [...]", "[a]nalytic languages are especially common in China and Southeast Asia, where examples include Vietnamese". I've changed the article to make isolation seem more like a relative axis. The entire section of alleged examples of isolating languages were all just about highly analytic languages. This section was written while grossly confusing what isolation is with what analysis is.

On the other hand, I think there is enough on analytic languages to merit an article. In fact, the article on isolation as it is stands with no references whatsoever—I'll add some later. Why were both articles merged to begin with? Perhaps the one(s) who carried it out were simply confused about what both concepts are about?--Serafín33 (talk) 09:31, 22 April 2013 (UTC) (Further edited at 16:06 on 30 October 2013 (UTC).)

Isn't it pretty much established by now that Sapir's writing is mostly about Sapir's opinions, and has very little to do with anything in the real world? (Logically one might think there must have been an ur-Sapirism, which came before he had uttered an opinion about anything, but I think it was John Updike's mother who was able to feed a family on nothing but left-overs, without there ever having been an original meal.)

David Lloyd-Jones (talk) 17:30, 5 March 2014 (UTC)

Not that bad, actually.

I read it, and when you follow a couple of the links and briefly read over them, it really isn't hard to understand. When I came up against the word "morpheme", I simply clicked the link, read over it briefly, and was back here in a second. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 99.35.197.10 (talk) 03:10, 5 January 2014 (UTC)

Relationship with tonal languages

The Dutch version of this article states that isolating languages are usually also tonal languages, the tones serving to distinguish between what would otherwise be homophones - examples being Vietnamese, Thai and the Chinese languages. I don't know if this is true, but if so I reckon it would be worth mentioning here. If not, the Dutch version (and possibly some other language versions?) should presumably be corrected.213.127.210.95 (talk) 17:53, 3 December 2016 (UTC)

Example in Explanation section

"On average, words in English have a morpheme per word ratio substantially greater than one." -- Is English really a good example here? Among Indo-European languages at least, I'd expect English to be on the low end of morpheme per word ratios considering its relative lack of inflections. Daß Wölf 07:17, 30 August 2019 (UTC)

Image

The image at the bottom of the page claims that the white spots are isolating languages. However, Tagalog is also coloured white even though I have seen it described as agglutinative, in fact, most non-Oceanic Austronesian languages are agglutinative, based on what I have read. Also, WALS is claiming that Tagalog has 'little affixing' and yet Wikipedia's own article on Tagalog grammar clearly shows that this is wrong. -MToumbola (talk) 12:38, 1 December 2019 (UTC)

Igbo is isolating?

The article claims that Igbo is an isolating language, even though the Igbo verb is shown to be heavily inflected in pretty much every grammar that I have come across. Does anyone have a source for the claim that Igbo is isolating? — Preceding unsigned comment added by Umu igbo (talk • contribs) 01:31, 20 April 2022 (UTC)

Added sources, needs more revision

I added more sources (and an examples list section) to hopefully facilitate the expansion of this page. I would love some help in developing it and also making it easier to read. I'm no expert either, but hopefully the sources provided are useful to anyone wanting to delve into this and make it better. Edenaviv5 (talk) 15:03, 22 March 2023 (UTC)

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