Types of Conlang

good morning interweb let's world built morphemes are the atoms of language units of speech we can't break down into smaller meaningful parts break is a single morpheme word it has a one to one morpheme per word ratio break a bull features two morphemes two to one and unbreakable features three three to one morphemes can either be bounded or free free morphemes can exist in isolation and still make sense bounded morphemes are only meaningful when tacked on to other words when we fix morphemes to words to indicate something grammatical it's called inflection in English we inflect for Perales a tense tutor person singular to present participle to show scale in adjectives and so on inflectional morphology differs from the derivational morphology from the last video in that the meaning of inflected words are not changed ergo they don't usually get their own separate dictionary entries more on this in later videos but for now just take that to inflect the word is to affix it to convey grammatical features goddess cool now in theory all languages exist somewhere on a spectrum that goes from analytical to synthetic to polysynthetic analytical languages tend to have a low morpheme toward ratio little to no inflection and in extreme cases making limited use of derivation and compounding when forming words we call these extreme cases isolating languages now languages in which words tend to consist of more than one morpheme are called synthetic these languages tend to have plenty of inflection derivation and compounding extremely synthetic languages in which words consists of many many morphemes are called polysynthetic languages they make use of an epic amount of inflection derivation and compounding to create really complex structures analytical and isolating languages tend to be located in East and Southeast Asia West Africa and South Africa these languages all share some interesting common feature they use predominantly monosyllabic morphemes and sometimes even monosyllabic words they used homes they use helper words and word order to convey grammatical intent and their grammatical rules are way less rigid than those of synthetic languages consider the Chinese sentence kneeble I wore Baku which when pronounced correctly could mean if you don't come I won't go when you don't come I won't go since you don't come I won't go and you won't come and I won't go if context serves to sufficiently delineate meaning then all is well in the world if not helper words for if when since and and etc can be brought in word order also plays an important role here take the English sentence Bob ace Verger's English word order is almost always of the form SFIO subject-verb-object the person or thing about whom the statement is made the doing word and the thing acted on by the subject if we change the words about burgers ate Bob Bob goes from being the subject to the object based on his location within the clause and the meaning of the sentence is totally changed synthetic languages may encode this kind of thing with infections so their word order is freed up now weaken further subdivide synthetic and polysynthetic languages into agglutinative and fusional languages on the gluten ative side we have some Bantu languages Japanese Korean and Turkish as examples and on the fusional side you're looking at French Russian Greek and Sanskrit that kind of thing a group native and fusional languages tend to be polar opposites of each other a glutinous of languages express only one meaning per morpheme and each morpheme is distinct they are literally glued on to roots whereas fusion languages express multiple meanings per morpheme and they tend to be indistinct literally fused to the root word take the catch forward for Ayase Miku Ronnie here Miku means eat raah marks the past tense and knee marks the first person singular I contrast that with ih in Spanish call me where the e indicates first-person singer past tense and indicative mood that is a sentence that is a statement of fact personally I read like fusion of languages you can't beat him when it comes to compactness but interestingly most of the world's languages are agglutinative and many of the big stars of Kahn lining are to Esperanto Klingon and Quenya polysynthetic languages primarily found amongst Eskimo and American Indian languages but also in the Northern Caucasus and Australia take synthesis to a whole new level compounding morphemes together to such an extent that sentence spanning words are often produced like this beautiful you pick word meaning he had not yet said again that he was going to hunt reindeer the breakdown of the word being reindeer hunt future say negation again third-person singular indicative know that some of the morphemes are a glutton Civ and some are fusional or this cheyenne name meaning a bear stands in the shade now seeing as work on langurs and not hard core academic linguist it's worth mentioning that which could exist beyond the polysynthetic languages are legal synthetic languages these do not exist in the real world but if they did they'd be like putty synthetic languages except they'd have very few morphemes say a hundred or so and we'll combine them synthetically to form words far far longer and more complex than those of known polysynthetic languages think new speak and you're kinda in the right ballpark now in reality languages tend not to fall neatly into any one of these categories like Japanese treats its nouns analytically and its verbs synthetically also NAT Lang's are constantly evolving in fact linguist or MH Dickson theorizes that the evolution cycle of NAT Lang's is to start out fusional and over time go more analytic then agglutinative and then loop back to fusional which is kind of neat like maybe we could create a fusional profile line and modify it literally simulating many thousands of years of evolution or maybe we create a messy kitchen sink line that is bang in the middle of a transition from one type to another anyways despite this being a somewhat outdated system I still think it's really useful when it comes to online it's nice to have an end game but along the way choose a little from column a not a little from column B therein lies the fun of it so there you go types of con lang done tell me what type of languages have you been creating good morning interweb real-time follow-up the linguist in this video is called or M W Dixon not or mah Dixon apparently I can't even read my own scripts apologies follow-up from the last video I got a tweet from someone asking well hey how do you get around this problem of derivation making your language look very similar TLD or it's a balancing act between the creation of new words and the derivation of those words and how we play with those scales will determine the flavor our language will have hardly any root words plus a ton of derivation and everything gonna be somewhat homogenous loads of root words plus hardly any derivation and there's going to be a huge variety in your language that all being said like don't be afraid of homogeneity it's a natural part of language like take English how many one syllable words can you think of that look and sound like the word black for example tones and then if we include two silver words and three syllable words even more homogeneity is okay not lines do this the conlangs should too don't be afraid of us anyways thank you so much for watching and until next time Edgar

Channel: Artifexian

Views: 208,247

Rating: 4.9550285 out of 5

Keywords: Artifexian, worldbuilding, conlang, language, linguistics, morpheme, lexicon, dictionary, analytical languages, synthetic languages, polysynthetic langauges, oligosynthetic languages, fusional languages, agglutinative languages

Id: fGcEMQC-L-4

Length: 8min 27sec (507 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 13 2017

Reddit Comments

[u/cilicia_ball]

It's always a great day when Artifexian posts

[u/Adarain]

Hey, /u/Artifexian. I’ve watched the video, and I have a few… criticisms. In chronological order (I typed these up as I was watchign the video)

• I don’t know how common this view is among actual linguists, but the way I always think of derivation vs inflection is a bit different from what you present here. In my view, derivation is a function: stem → stem, while inflection is a function: stem → word. This explains why in most languages, the inflection is the “last thing”, as many languages don’t allow further modification of a word (but e.g. Greenlandic has derivational clitics, which go word → stem)

• You list isolating as the most extreme case of analytical (I’m not sure whether that is a useful split in the first place, but I digress), but for some reason, you choose to show polysynthetic as a separate “category” from synthetic, when it really would just perfectly mirror the isolating from before.

• What exactly do you mean with “looser grammar” (in isolating langs)? I suspect you mean more context-based, but I find it a bit of an … unfavourable wording, as it may sound like these languages actually have less grammar, which is certainly not true.

• You kinda show agglutinative and fusional as distinct and exclusive concepts, when really, it’s just a spectrum between two extremes that are barely if ever met (e.g. in Bantu languages, morphemes will often affect tones of nearby morhphemes, so classifying Zulu as strictly agglutinative is already problematic because of that). You do mention this, but only later, and it’s kinda misleading.

• It would’ve been nice to get some points on south america onto the map. Or an example of a non-indo-european fusional language.

• 5:45, oh boy. Putting oligomorphemic on the same spectrum as morpheme count is quite misleading. It’s a different spectrum altogether (number of morphemes per language, rather than per word) and can exist in any of the forms you showed before. Just see the linked document above for examples of isolating and fusionally synthetic oligoes.

• Finally, and this is probably more important than the other points: Your title is misleading. I was expecting a video that explained the difference between logical, auxiliary, naturalistic, engineered … languages, not one on morphological typology.

[u/OliverWotei]

.

[u/Darkgamma]

But Artifexian polysynthesis is not just VERY SYNTHESIS it's a combination of polypersonal agreement and verb prominence (typically noun incorporation, but also topicality (topic-comment-like structures) and lack of satellite marking)

[u/Adarain]

Hey /u/Artifexian

Somehow your video managed to get auto-removed. This usually happens when something triggers reddit’s spam-filter. I don’t really know what happened, either way it should show up now. I’ve also reflaired it to resource, which I find more appropriate.

[u/Somegeezer]

Your descriptions are really more types of language in general, rather than types of conlang. When we think of types of conlang, we tend to think about different sorts of features to describe them. Auxilliary langs, art langs, logical langs, naming langs, etc.

[u/sparksbet]

A bit tangential, but: dude, please don't pronounce Chinese in your videos if you're not going to put effort into at least approximating how those words actually sound. No one can be perfect at a language they haven't studied, but pronouncing <qu> as [kʰu:] (it's [t͡ɕʰy] in Standard Mandarin) is really distracting and makes it seem like you haven't bothered to put in the minimal effort to even look up how the word is actually pronounced. I understand that you can't be expected to learn a language just to read an example in a video, but at least typing the sentence into Google translate and trying to imitate the pronunciation heard there would have been an improvement. You'd honestly have seemed more credible if you just eschewed reading the Mandarin altogether and just read the gloss, since this is about morphosyntax anyway. In future, I suggest doing one or the other.

[u/[deleted]]

Hey Artifexian,

Just thought I'd say I love your videos.

Thanks for doing what you do :)

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