Questions tagged [isolating-languages]
A language with no bound morphology.
12 questions
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Current thinking on whether isolating languages have more complex syntax, or pragmatics, or lexicon, or other features
I'm wondering what the current thinking is on whether isolating languages really do have more complicated syntax or pragmatics or leixcons or other features than non-isolating ones.
I found an ...
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Are there highly analytic (isolating) languages without tone?
I know many highly analytic languages (Chinese, Vietnamese, Thai) are tonal languages. Are there similarly analytic or isolating languages that don't use tone the way those languages do? The closest I ...
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Is it possible to have a word-based language completely without word inflection?
First, sorry if I'm not using the correct terminology here.
By "word-based", I mean typical Indo-European languages (plus Uralic) where there are only tens of characters (e.g. "A to Z" (Latin) or "А ...
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Are fusional languages easier to learn than isolating languages?
As some of you may know, auxlangers tend towards isolating languages. At the very least, the direct object is determined by word order rather than with a case ending (mostly because most West ...
user19661
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The difference between isolating and analytic languages?
There seems to really be a very minor difference between analytic and isolating languages. A lot of the time I just don't see isolating used at all but analytic used instead. Generally I also see ...
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Is there a dominant sequence in which a language throughout its evolution changes its type?
To clarify, by type I refer to terms like isolating, agglutinative,flectional...I think the terms which Humboldt introduced for a rough categorization.
Now, I heard of languages, that changed their ...
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difference between Isolating (analytics) vs inflected (fusional) vs agglutinative languages
It's not easy to grasp these concepts. I spent a lot of time perusing wikipedia articles but still can't really understand what makes a language: inflexed, isolating or agglutinative,
Background
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How frequent are different morphosyntactic types?
I started wondering what share of all world's languages are polysynthetic (on any practical definition of polysynthetic, i.e. the prototype approach, the macroparameter theory (Baker 1995), etc.), and ...
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Does writing influence grammar?
Do we know of any cases where the grammar of a language was influenced by the imperfection of its writing system? For example, has any language become isolating because it had a logographic writing, ...
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How do isolating VSO languages differentiate the subject and object?
In some Austronesian languages, which typically lack inflection, subjects appear structurally identical to their objects. What constructs do Verb-Subject-Object languages use to distinguish the two?
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Are there purely isolating/analytic languages with grammatical gender?
It seems that all the things which reflect grammatical gender in languages have to do with inflectional (presumably also agglutinative) morphology, such as agreement.
But is that just coincidence, it ...
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Are any of the isolating languages of East Asia showing signs of gaining inflections?
It's generally accepted that languages go through a cycle of changes to their morphological type.
English is losing its inflectional endings and becoming more isolating/analytic.
But what about the ...
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