Morphological Typology of the Protolanguages Different morphological types emerge from the known macrofamily protolanguages. For example, the highly polysynthetic Proto-Dené-SinoCaucasian is the ancestor of the isolating Chinese languages, and of the polysynthetic North Caucasian languages. Agglutination and fusion are forms of inflection; agglutination is one-dimensional while fusion is multidimensional. Languages with a high frequency of inflection are called “synthetic languages”. Languages with so much inflection that it’s difficult 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.
Proto-Dené-Sino-Caucasian was a highly polysynthetic language employing both agglutination and fusion, which used both prefixes and suffixes. The noun class system included masculine, feminine, animate and inanimate. 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. Its vast phonological system of 50 consonants included three series of sibilant-affricate and resonant combinations, as well as lateral affricates / dl, tl and tl’/ plus an uvular series /ʁ ɢ x, χ/. The presence of ejectives is a feature it had in common with Amerind and Afro-Asiatic. Another possible correspondence is the distinction between inclusive and exclusive “we.” The verbal system accommodated up to four prefix positions before the root. Prefixes indicated categories like aspect, tense, mode, valence, and pronominal agents and/or patients.
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