Phonogramology (continued 4)
According to the traditional classification of languages into analytic and synthetic types, Chinese is always cited as an extremely analytic language. The language has no inflection. There are no morphological markers or processes denoting number, gender, person, tense, grammatical role, or parts of speech. There is no concordance between parts of a constituent. Affixes are relatively scarce.
The words in inflection languages (phonographic languages) are composed of phonemes, and the demarcation between phonemes is not obvious. The concept of phoneme combination will change due to the change of position and grammatical meaning. Examples: Latin, Greek, English, French, German, Italian, Spanish, and Russian, etc.
Characteristics of inflection languages:
- There is a change in the form of a word (typically the ending) to express a grammatical function or attribute such as tense, mood, person, number, case, and gender. “a set of word forms differing only in respect of inflections”
- In linguistic morphology, inflection is a process of word formation, in which a word is modified to express different grammatical categories such as tense, case, voice, aspect, person, number, gender, mood, animacy, and definiteness.
In linguistic typology, most phonographic languages are synthetic languages.
Basically, a synthetic language (phonographic language) is a language with a high morpheme-per-word ratio, as opposed to a low morpheme-per-word ratio in what is described as an analytic language (ideographic language).
(To be continued)