Synthetic Language
This article on Synthetic Language gives an overview of its types, its characteristics, and examples of how languages are synthetic. It also compares and contrasts synthetic and analytic languages to some extent, discussing the spectrum formed between these two contrasting classifications. Synthetic languages have a high morpheme-per-word ratio and combine multiple concepts into words. There are different degrees of synthesis — analytic separate concepts into different words, while synthetic languages combine multiple concepts into one word. Between these two extremes, languages fall along a spectrum of more analytic to more synthetic based on instances of morpheme-to-word ratios. This article provides examples from various languages to illustrate the continuum of analytic to synthetic nature upon which a language may fall. The various categories range from more analytic to more synthetic, with a note about the theoretical oligosynthetic language. This section discusses specific instances of morpheme-to-word ratios varying across languages. Synthetic languages are widespread and well documented. Many Indo-European languages are synthetic languages, as well as Kartvelian languages, Semitic languages, and many American Languages such as Navajo and Mohawk. Of these Indo-European languages, synthetic language is found in the Romance family, the Germanic family, the Slavic family, and the Indo-Iranian family. Many of these languages did not begin as synthetic; the Germanic, Hellenic, and Romance groups started off as analytical. Over a long period of time, these languages evolved to incorporate synthetic features.
There are two main ways that language can perform synthesis. Derivational synthesis combines morphemes of different syntactic categories to create new words, as in German, Greek, English, Polish, Russian, and other languages. Relational synthesis joins affixes to root words to alter their meaning, and sometimes their syntactic category, as in Italian, Spanish, Finnish, Japanese, and other languages. Additionally, the article attempts to explain the three main categories of synthetic language, as well as a proposed fourth category. These include: agglutinating languages, which combine distinct morphemes, each with a single assigned meaning, into words where they retain their forms and can easily be separated from one another; fusional languages, which fuse together morphemes that may have many different assigned meanings in such a way that they are very difficult to distinguish from one another; and polysynthetic languages, which combine multiple stems and inflectional morphemes into highly complex words. A suggested fourth type is the theoretical oligosynthetic languages which would use a very small number of morphemes synthetically but still function as a full language.
The question was then, how to improve the article. When we found it, it had an incoherent lead section, too much jargon, flow problems, inconsistent formatting, and zero sources. We had seven people in the group to work on the project so we broke the job into seven pieces. They are as follows:
- Rewrite the lead section - The original did a poor job of summarizing what the article was about. We rewrote it for clarity and inclusivity.
- Define terms - Many of the terms had little or no explanation. We found definitions for those terms.
- Sources- There were no sources to start with, one was added while we worked on the project outside of Wikipedia. This was broken into two parts,
- Part one was to find sources and pinpoint the relevant sections within the sources.
- Part two was to find where in the article the sources fit.
- Formatting - The article had many examples of the various types of synthesis in various languages but the formatting was inconsistent. We arranged the examples into a consistent bullet point structure.
- Language and Flow - the original article was full of jargon and sections weren’t their own cohesive unit. These sections were rewritten to include the definitions mentioned previously and to make them more readable to lay people.
- Copyediting - The sections were then brought together and edited for grammar and spelling where needed. Citations were put in using the Wiki format.
