Morphological Typology

MORPHOLOGICAL TYPOLOGY OF THE PROTOLANGUAGES

Morphological Typology has limited value in synchronic differentiation of language families, as some terms are vague (analytical, isolating, agglutinating, synthetic, polysynthetic) but above all because different morphological types arise from the known protolanguages. For example, the highly polysynthetic Proto-Dené-Sino-Caucasian is the ancestor of the isolating Chinese languages, and of the highly synthetic North Caucasian languages.

One could try to keep it simple by saying that the words of analytical languages lack endings, that agglutinating languages build chains of endings from blocks with a single meaning each, and that the endings of inflectional languages refer to more than one thing. Polysynthetic languages combine multiple parts of speech into one word by using fusional and agglutinative elements.

Another way is to recognize agglutination and fusion as forms of inflection; agglutination is one-dimensional while fusion is multidimensional.

Languages with a lot of inflections are called synthetic languages; these inflections may be either agglutinative or fusional. Languages that have so much inflection that there is no easy way to distinguish an inflected word from a sentence are called polysynthetic languages.

Finnish is an example of an agglutinating synthetic language while Sanskrit is an example of a fusional synthetic language. In this paradigm, English would be an analytical language with fusional elements.

I Proto-Dené-Sino-Caucasian was a highly polysynthetic language employing both agglutination and fusion. Among its descendants are analytical languages like Chinese, polysynthetic inflectional languages like the NW and NE Caucasian languages, and the agglutinative inflectional tongues Basque, Burushaski and Navajo.

II Proto-Eurasiatic was an inflectional agglutinating language that used ablaut and preferred suffixes to prefixes. Among its descendants are fusional inflectional languages like Proto-Indo-European, Latin and Sanskrit, agglutinating inflectional languages like Finnish and Turkish, and analytical languages with elements of fusional inflection, like English.

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III Proto-Afroasiatic was a fusional inflectional language that used ablaut, prefixes, infixes and suffixes. Among its descendants are the modern Arabic dialects that are analytic with inflectional elements of both a fusional and agglutinating nature.

IV Proto-Nilo-Saharan was a fusional inflectional language that used both prefixes and suffixes. Among its descendants are analytical languages like Central Sudanic and inflectional agglutinating languages like Nilotic and Nubian.

V Proto-Niger-Congo was an inflectional agglutinating language. Among its descendants are inflectional agglutinating languages like the Ntu Group and isolating languages like those of the Kwa and Benue branches.

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