Talk:Analytic language

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Analytic language or isolation language?
What is the article intended to be about? It is titled "Analytic language", and most of the text is about analytic languages, but begins by defining isolating languages, which it (by the way) explains are a different concept from analytic languages. If they are different concepts, they should have different articles. -Pgan002 23:47, 5 February 2007 (UTC)

Not only that but "isolating languages" connects here. Someone needs to make a separate page for isolating languages. Calaf 08:41, 1 June 2007 (UTC)

Yes, I agree. Isolating languages and analytic languages are NOT the same things. Moreover, analytic and synthetic languages are both from one group of flective languages that is not even mentioned in the box... Someone must correct this mess.--Andrei Knight 01:32, 20 April 2007 (UTC)

The German page that is linked to in this article is also the one describing isolating language (needs to be http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analytischer_Sprachbau, but I don't know how to rectify that.)

Simple?!

 * Thus, the formation of German plurals is a simple, rule-governed inflectional pattern.

Call that simple? Of the languages that I know of, German is among the most complicated ones in terms of formation of noun plurals. Yes, there are rules/patterns, but there are many of them. Some nouns have two plural forms, depending on context: Wort - Wörter - Worte.--84.188.136.83 01:51, 24 Jun 2005 (UTC)

as you said :"Some nouns have two plural forms, depending on context: ''Wort - Wörter - Worte'" no, I'm afraid you are incorrect, as a matter of fact, the plural form depends on its actual meaning. here: when "Wort" as "word(unit of a sentence)", its plural form is "Wörter"; however when it's used as "saying(something man said)", its plural form is "Worte". here "Wort-Wörter" and "Wort-Worte" should be treated as two words.

Mann
The box never says what der Mann 	die Männer mean in English. Jidanni (talk) 04:10, 16 February 2008 (UTC)

Example sentence
I don't think the example sentence contrasts the sythetic nature of English with analytic languages well enough, as it only has two words with more than one morpheme: "friend-s" and "egg-s". I would suggest a replacement, but I don't know any analytic languages. &#123;&#123;User:Vacuum/sig}} 02:55, 4 February 2006 (UTC)

-*I thought of two examples, one common expression and one from the Tang poetry. See below.Hillgentleman 07:42, 3 September 2006 (UTC)

The word "生" Translate to "life" is kind of wrong it should be "Birth" My wing hk 13:54, 24 April 2007 (UTC)
 * I think the context is important. The English isn't a transcription, it's the equivalent meaning. We don't have "life days" but the Chinese and Koreans (생일) do. 203.229.115.58 06:47, 7 May 2007 (UTC)

Example of Hyperrcorrectness
It seems to me that the example of hypercorrectness provided at the end of the article is in fact no such thing, since the sentence provided is simply correct, albeit with non-colloquial placement of the terms of the subject.

non-coloquial placement of terms of the subject? what do you mean by that? i can see hypercorrectness in the last sentence


 * I think he means the subject placement makes the sentence seem overly formal. Which has something to do with hypercorrectness anyway.

Is the hypercorrect sentence actually correct? Shouldn't it be the shipmaster saluting 'her', not saluting 'she'? -- --Avanu 02:57, 2 April 2006 (UTC)

I agree. "The shipmaster saluted Martin and she" is an example of incorrect English that appears to be hypercorrected. The correct sentence is "The shipmaster saluted Martin and her." I'll change it now. Doctor Love 17:46, 2 May 2006 (UTC)


 * Upon closer inspection, it appears that both of the examples at the end of the article are incorrect. In fact, I can't understand what is being said with the entire sentence.  Are the examples supposed to be incorrect?  The author of this last segment needs to make his point a little clearer.  Doctor Love 17:53, 2 May 2006 (UTC)

Both sentences are incorrect--the second one is a hypercorrection based on what the correct version of the first sentence would be. For example, many English-speakers were once told that it was incorrect to say "You and me ought to learn better English"; the correct form is "You and I...." They didn't understand that the mistake was not the phrase "you and me" itself--it was the fact that an objective pronoun, "me," was used as a subject. So later they say, "This is just between you and I," even though the correct version is "... between you and me." They misunderstood the first correction; therefore, they thought it was incorrect to use the phrase "you and me." In the second sentence, they changed a correct phrase to an ungrammatical one out of a misunderstanding of a previous correction.

Agreed that the "saluted Martin and she" sentence doesn't make any sense. The subject of the sentence is "the shipmaster". This concept is hard to grasp for native English-speakers because it's the last vestige of the accusative/dative case that you see in German.

Chinese example "suoyou + dou"
the suoyou and dou here looks to me to be redundant as the sentence could do with just either of them still be correct (in Mandarin and not Cantonese). what's done here is similar to people using zhǐ(只) + éryǐ(而已), e.g. "wǒ zhǐ huì zhōngwén éryǐ", where either can be used alone.


 * YES BUT the point of this article is to show Chinese as an ANALYTIC LANGUAGE, not argue over the fine points of Chinese expression. The example sentence sucks, any better ideas? 203.218.91.193 15:57, 29 March 2006 (UTC)


 * What do you mean by in Mandarin and not Cantonese?Hillgentleman 07:26, 3 September 2006 (UTC)
 * A common expression: You eat already rice not yet? = Nei5 Sik9 Zo2 Fan6 Mei6? (Cantonese) = Ni3 Chi4 le Fan4 mei2 you3? (National Chinese) = Have you eaten or not?'(English). Even the word you=Nei=Ni can be omitted --Hillgentleman 07:26, 3 September 2006 (UTC)


 * Another example, of Li Bai: Bed front bright moon light, confused be ground above frost. =  zong tzin ming yuD GUONG, yi sI dEI seUNG SEUNG (Cantonese; capital letter= high tone or rising pitch) = The bright moon light in front of my bed  I mistook for ground frost..Hillgentleman 07:40, 3 September 2006 (UTC)

Bulgarian is not the only Slavic analytic language
Macedonian is arguably as much so. -Iopq 13:52, 27 December 2006 (UTC)

Bulgarian
Bulgarian and Macedonian are the only analytic Slavic languages — analytic in their noun system — acquiring this feature from the Balkan linguistic union. This allows linguists to study the process through which this occurred. First, cases began to mix sounds, which allowed the distinctions between forms to be forgotten. Inflected words representing relationships were supposedly replaced by prepositional phrases. In prepositions followed by an inflected word, the word easily lost its declension. Are there any sources for this paragraph? Bulgarian (and it's western dialect) are certainly not analytic. Their nouns are inflected for gender, number, definiteness and case. Here are some examples: čovek (man), čoveci (men), čovekǎt (the man), čovecite (the men); or vǎlk (wolf), vǎlci (wolves), vǎlkǎt (the wolf), vǎlcite (the wolves).

As for the Balkan sprachbund, how did Bulgarian purportedly acquire this feature from there? Albanian, Greek and Romanian nouns are more inflected than German nouns which the article presents as the ultimate example of an inflected language.--Domitius 12:53, 2 April 2007 (UTC)


 * Bulgarian is not analytic -- just look at it's verbs! FilipeS (talk) 22:24, 9 December 2007 (UTC)
 * Totally agreed. Bulgarian is certainly not analytic, and is more analytic than Spanish or German, which are listed earlier in the article as being synthetic. Macedonian is listed in there as well, which is equally non-analytic. Jassummisko (talk) 20:07, 21 September 2022 (UTC)

Encyclopedic
I think here present tense example would be better.

Can we get rid of the comment in the text of the entry?

Analytic/isolating confusion
This article and the article on isolating languages, claim that analytic languages are languages where meaning is more affected by word order and particles than by inflection, while isolating languages have few affixes, declensions, et cetera, and mostly consist of separate words. However, everywhere else on Wikipedia, it seems like it is analytic languages that consist mostly of separate words. I don't know the difference, and it looks like none of the other discussion posters do either, so I posted an "expert" tag. Let's hope some professional linguist is able to sort this out.

A. Parrot (talk) 23:47, 29 April 2008 (UTC)


 * It's been seven years! As a student of linguistics, I second you, A. Parrot; as far as definitions go as brought up by my profs, Wiki's gotten the two mixed up. What I've learnt is:


 * + isolating languages are one-morpheme-per-word (Mandarin Chinese being the prime example)


 * + analytic languages may have more (English being an example of such)


 * Has the expert come by?
 * – Penelope why (talk) 13:50, 25 July 2015 (UTC)


 * I'm just going to note that Mandarin is not an isolating language, because many (if not most) of its words are composed of two or more morphemes. It is analytic because it relies on adding extra words to denote things like aspect, relation, and so on. (Compare to a language like Korean, which denotes relations like the nominative case by adding an extra syllable.) That being said, that relies on a definition of "word" that I'm not too clear on (namely, why do we say that e.g. Mandarin is broken up into words but e.g. Korean isn't?)
 * Blanket P.I. (talk) 01:34, 18 November 2017 (UTC)

cultural bias
"The currently most prominent and widely used analytic language is modern English [...]" This seems to be a strange statement when you have "Chinese" on your list of analytic languages... — Preceding unsigned comment added by 141.20.6.62 (talk) 19:10, 6 July 2017 (UTC)


 * Unlike English, Chinese is not "widely used". That's why. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Dddcg (talk • contribs) 13:46, 13 September 2018 (UTC)


 * Derp. Glad to see this sockpuppeteer's account has been shut down. I do think a better source is needed, however, for English as a "mostly analytic" language. The current source is a personal page hosted by the University of Massachusetts that appears to be course notes. Jazzcowboy (talk) 11:10, 28 April 2019 (UTC)

...don't you think you should rephrase that?
Many of the linguistics articles on Wikipedia are difficult for the "average reader" to understand, but this one has to set some sort of record. It is completely incomprehensible. While I understand the concept of WP:SOFIXIT, I don't feel that I am the one to do so. Indeed, I feel I would need to earn several degrees (in addition to the B.A. and J.D. I already have) just to be able to read it. Neutron (talk) 07:05, 2 January 2021 (UTC)


 * Can you give examples of what is particularly difficult to understand? Seems to me it does a decent job at explanation concepts; it even explains basic linguistic concepts like "inflection" in the body.--Megaman en m (talk) 09:49, 2 January 2021 (UTC)

Bulgarian (and Macedonian) are mostly but not fully analytic
Bulgarian (and Macedonian) still preserve the vocative case. -- BonsMans1 (talk•contributions), 14:03, 26 June 2021 (UTC)

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