Analytic v.s. Synthetic System of Language

 

 

You do not want to know how many times I rewrote this and how long it took me to figure out what these meant. Spoiler Alert: more than 3 hours. So it is blog worthy. I think it was so hard because English isn't really very Synthetic so I had to look at weird other language examples and figure out how to do it. Also I kept mixing the concepts up and thinking that methods and like mini concepts within the systems were separate concepts from the systems and that sucked because then I rewrote to fit those concepts but then it was wrong and not what the question was asking and bleeeeeeeeh. Kacy + Linguistics = ???? Maybe I don't want to be an English major. Or maybe it is just this crappy book that doesn't even include a sound chart that has the English sounds with examples of them in it. We just are supposed to know those. Even though they are different sounds in other languages. Like French. Because that isn't confusing to me at all. WHAT. I still don't even know if that is right. 

Analytic v.s. Synthetic System of Language

If you are interested in languages it is important to know how to distinguish a language as having an “analytic” system or a “synthetic” system. In an “analytic” system of language meaning is more strongly based on the order of words rather than inflectional morphemes or affixes that are added. For example when we look at the sentence John threw the ball to Jane. We infer through the word order that John is agent that is performing the verb to throw and is performing it on the direct object the ball and performing the action to Jane who is the indirect object. In essence, we know who is doing what with what to who all based on the order of the words. With this system we cannot make the sentence ‘Jane threw the ball to John’ because the word order changes the meaning of the sentence.  This is vastly different than in a “synthetic” language system where you can change word order and have it mean the same thing.

A synthetic system uses inflections rather than word order in order to identify the part of speech in the sentence. This system use affixes to distinguish meanings and identify the part of speech for the words or morphemes in a sentence regardless of location. An example of this is in the Nepali language to say, “Chelseale Kacylai kitab diyo” or “Chelsea gave the book to Kacy”. The bolded letters show the affixes that allow you to identify that Chelsea is the subject who is doing the action while Kacy is the indirect object who is receiving the action from anywhere in the sentence. These affixes make it possible to say, “Kacylai Chelseale kitab diyo” and anyone from Nepal would still understand this sentence to mean the same thing as before even though the order of names has now changed. This ability to change location of the agent and indirect object would not be possible in an analytic language because these systems rely on word order which would make ‘Kacy’ the agent and ‘Chelsea’ the indirect object. That would mean that ‘Kacy gave the book to Chelsea’ instead of ‘Chelsea gave the book to Kacy’. English is more reliant on word order than inflections and therefore is more of an analytic system but it is still a mix of the two systems. While the English language places more meaning in the word order of sentences, there are circumstances where English does make use a synthetic language system’s use of inflections. An example of this is seen in how we express plurality by adding ‘-s’ or by expressing past tense with the inflectional ending ‘-ed’ added to the root of verbs. While the English language is considered primarily an analytical language it is indeed a mixed system language as it uses aspects of both to create understanding and meaning.