Word Facts

It was discussed yesterday how the highly, even unrealistically minimalistic variety of languages known as ' oligosynthetic ' could probably not exist in natural languages, but there was a time when some thought otherwise. Languages including Nahuatl, spoken by the Aztecs and their descendants, as well as Blackfoot, also known as Siksiká, have at one time or another been claimed to be oligosynthetic in some way or another. These ideas are now discredited, and these languages, like most in the Americas, are considered to be polysynthetic . Polysynthetic language may appear from first glance to be opposite to oligosynthetic languages, given that they have extremely complex morphosyntactic systems, but actually both rely on a level of compounding which would put German or Turkish to shame. Examples of what could be considered oligosynthetic languages will be the topic for tomorrow.

Depending upon how much information can be added to words in a given language morphologically, for example with verbal suffixes that show the information about the subject such as in Spanish, a language is places on a scale; if a language is analytic then there is little morphology, and the most a language can be is polysynthetic . However, there is one group which uses even less morphology, but these only exist in made up languages. A so called oligosynthetic language is one with very few morphemes whatsoever, but it is necessary to point out that this also includes words, as well as affixes and anything else, so a language like Mandarin , with almost no affixes is still not oligosynthetic because it has many words that exist on their own. Oligosynthetic languages are therefore considered to be only theoretically possible, and would require a level of compounding which is not necessarily practical for day-to-day usage, as this might amount to even more combination than using a polysyn...

In this third and final post in this short series about oligosynthetic languages, which you can see more about in the link . All Oligosynthetic languages classified as such are all invented languages, generally with the idea of simplicity in mind. A few examples of these include Ygyde, Sona, and Newspeak. Toki pona is a language developed with only 120 words, though now an additional 3 have been added. This language relies on a great deal of inferences, context, but also compounding such that a word like 'coffee' might appear as something equivalent to 'hot brown liquid'. This language however was created not in order to be for complicated communication, but for easy-to-learn language for business and other activities like that. Make sure to check out the new video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jTKKSf35LSE&t=10s