There
are roughly four kinds of morphologies that languages use: Analytic,
Inflectional, Agglutinative, and Polysynthetic. Morphological classifications
are made based on how the morphology of the language works, that is, how are
words formed, combined, and inflected (if they are).
Analytic
languages are not inflected, that is, nouns and adjectives are not declined and
verbs are not conjugated. Instead, the order of the words determines
grammatical relationships. English is an analytical language, though not
perfectly so, because there are some agreement markers, tenses, etc in English.
For example *he do is
incorrect, because to do must be inflected to mark third person
singular subject: he does.
Chinese can also be said to be an analytic language, though words are so little
inflected in Chinese, that some would classify it as a minimal grammar
language. This is incorrect, since what languages lack in inflection (or morphology) they must make up
in word order, or syntax;
in a technical sense, both morphology and syntax are considered to form parts
of grammar. Both English
and Chinese rely on syntax, word order, to show grammatical relationships, e.g.
the subject must be in a certain position relative to the verb (in English, it
must precede it).
Inflectional
languages are different from analytic languages, because they do inflect (as
the name suggests) quite a lot. A good example is Latin, in which most words
are marked up and down for all kinds of tenses, moods, cases, agreements, and
more. When the words in the sentence are inflected to show agreement with all
their subjects, objects, and other arguments, then word order becomes very
fluid. Whereas analytical languages rely on strict word order, inflectional
languages have flexible word order.
Agglutinative
languages are those in which words can be combined easily. For example, instead
of saying the shoe of the
horse, agglutinative languages say horseshoe.
Agglutinative languages include German and Turkish. In these languages, new
words are formed by combining old ones, so that words can become very long, but
also contain a lot of information. This kind of morphology is called
productive, because new words are formed in a predictable manner. Agglutinative
languages can have both lots of agreements and inflections, or have rigid word
order, such as German.
The
last kind of morphological category, polysynthetic languages, is the least
understood by linguists, because none of the major written languages in the
world today, such as English, Chinese, Russian, Arabic, Hindi, etc, are
polysynthetic. Some Native American languages in North America, such as Navajo,
and some Polynesian languages are polysynthetic. Words, especially verbs, in these
languages also tend to become very long, because every argument in a sentence
is inflected on the verb, but also on other words with an argument structure,
such as prepositions. These languages are very difficult to learn, not only
because they are not properly understood, but also because one verb has
literally hundreds of inflections. For example, the average Navajo verb has
about 15 categories of prefixes, and a couple of affixes. These categories in
turn, have between six and 200 members. In addition, the affixes can move
around and change in agreement with other prefixes.
In
reality, no natural language belongs exclusively to one category. Japanese, for
example, has analytic pronouns (it uses postpositions to modify the role of
nouns in a sentence), but inflectional/agglutinative in its verbs (taberu means to eat; tabenai means to not eat).
