User:Alyssandra Bako/sandbox

Agglutinating Languages
Agglutinating languages have a high rate of agglutination in their words and sentences, meaning that the morphological construction of words consists of distinct morphemes that usually carry a single unique meaning. These morphemes always look the same no matter what word they are in, so it is easy to separate a word into its individual morphemes (cite Language Files pp. 173). Note that morphemes may be bound (that is, they must be attached to a word to have meaning, like affixes) or free (they can stand alone and still have meaning).

Swahili is an agglutinating language. For example, distinct morphemes are used in the conjugation of verbs:


 * Ni-na-soma: I-present-read or I am reading
 * U-na-soma: you-present-read or you are reading
 * A-na-soma: s/he-present-read or s/he is reading

Fusional Languages
Fusional languages are similar to agglutinating languages in that they involve the combination of many distinct morphemes. However, morphemes in fusional languages are often assigned several different lexical meanings, and they tend to be fused together so that it is difficult to separate individual morphemes from one another.

Brainstorming Work
Article to Improve: Synthetic language

Some research starting points for references:


 * synthetic Language. Oxford University Press, 2015. -- This just says "Another name for Inflectional language" - Ella


 * Perruchet, Pierre. "Defining the Knowledge Units of a Synthetic Language: Comment on Vokey and Brooks (1992)." Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, vol. 20, no. 1, 1994, pp. 223-228. -- Commentary on an experiment where people memorized words in a made-up language. -Ella


 * Reber, Arthur S. "Transfer of Syntactic Structure in Synthetic Languages." Journal of Experimental Psychology, vol. 81, no. 1, 1969, pp. 115-119.


 * Kettunen, Kimmo, Tuomas Kunttu, and Kalervo Järvelin. "To Stem Or Lemmatize a Highly Inflectional Language in a Probabilistic IR Environment?" Journal of Documentation, vol. 61, no. 4, 2005, pp. 476-496.


 * Saharia N, Sharma U, Kalita J. A Suffix-Based Noun and Verb Classifier for an Inflectional Language. 2010 International Conference on Asian Language Processing. IEEE; 2010, pp. 19-22.


 * Language files (2016). Dawson, Hope C, Phelan, Michael (Ed.), (12th ed.) Ohio State University, pp. 172-175.

Ideas from Erika: I think, in terms of revising existing content, there are a number of stylistic and organizational problems; overall, it reads like a paragraph was written out and then artificially separated by title breaks, rather than writing content for specific sections (e.g. new sections start with words like "however"). The lists of language examples are messy and could certainly be formatted better. As a section in specific need of revision, the introductory overview, in my opinion, does a poor job of actually explaining the topic. One more note, there is a section under the English language example that references multi-word phrases as possibly being able to be considered as single words, which I really think there should be more elaboration for. Also, in case you haven't checked, the talk page for this article is surprisingly active, so that's a good place to start looking, and should be taken into consideration before any changes are made. Epcoker (talk) 18:55, 10 October 2018 (UTC)

Ideas from Hannah: -Erika basically said this, but the whole article could use a check for jargon and clarification where its been too heavily used

-there's a specific note in the article that derivational and relational synthesis needs to be defined, so we might look into that

Ideas from Megan M:

- the 'degrees of synthesis' section might need a less confusing explanation/different structure (a little hard to follow)

- need sources for 'degrees of synthesis' section, I am looking on the library database but haven't found anything so far

- need to make the difference between derivational synthesis and relational synthesis a lot clearer, and change the formatting of the lines (hard to understand)

- provide a quick overview of the difference between derivational and relational synthesis right underneath the 'forms of synthesis' heading

- change the format of the 'linguistic typology' box?

- need a better overview of entire article at the very beginning

- need better definitions of pretty much everything; most of the definitions are confusing and some could be mixed up with other definitions

- overall the article needs a more scholarly tone

Emma- Hannah and Erika summed up my thoughts as well, I think the article could use some examples to better understand the topic at hand. Also there's a note saying the article may be worded to technically. We can consider writing it in more layman's terms. I think we should start assigning duties or sub topics of research for each of us so we know what we are responsible for. Especially so we can get some done over the break.

I feel like the part describing the difference between synthetic and analytic languages doesn't belong here, it would belong in the 'linguistic typology' article. We might want to see if we can attach citations to some of the stuff that's there. -- Ella

Makayla - Megan really summed up my thoughts with elaborating on the "degrees of synthesis" section with reference; definitions are needed and elaboration on the examples given. The organization and format, both of the degrees of synthesis section and overall needs work.

Hannah: I think at this point we should maybe decide who's going to do what so I thought I'd maybe make a suggestion. So that we all do some of the research we could maybe do something like a loose assignment of one or two people to a heading, just so we each have something to focus on. Maybe we should all contribute to making the intro/definition more readable, and then we could each have maybe the section that we're researching to improve? I don't know, just some ideas.

Possible outline:

Synthetic Language: -Definition Types of Synthetic Languages 1. Agglutinating Languages 2. Fusional Languages 3. Polysynthetic Languages 4. Maybe keep the Oligosynthetic part if we can find a source. Feel free of course to change this.Vericima (talk) 18:47, 1 November 2018 (UTC) (Ella)

So far we are all working on this article together by researching independently and meeting to discuss what we've found.

Peer Review Response
So, uppon reading the peer reviews, we don't need to change the plan much if at all. Everyone agrees we need to change the header paragraph, we might could just switch it with the 1st paragraph below that or just move that up. I agree with Nichole that the "Degrees of Synthesis" section is weird, should we just remove it? It would seem that if we added "very analytic" it would turn into the typology article. We may also approach another way to display derivation examples of synthetic words.

Vericima (talk) 03:35, 14 November 2018 (UTC) (Ella)

* Side note* I don't think we should remove the "degrees of synthesis" section without further research. There may be a way we could edit the article properly and fix this section to be more readable and accessible to the public. (Makayla)

Could we start to move more of the actual article/parts of the article into the sandbox now so that it's a bit easier to see what needs worked on? - Hannah

Rough Draft of New Lead

A synthetic language expresses by inflection or agglutination (when morphemes remain unchanged after combining them with other morphemes) the syntactic relationships within a sentence. A synthetic language differs from an analytic language primarily in morpheme-to-word ratio, since a synthetic language will naturally have a higher ratio of morphemes-to-words than an analytic language will. This is due to synthetic languages expressing more information per word through inflection or agglutination than an analytic language does through word order and helper words.