833: Structure and Inflection Mar 20, 2017

There are many ways to classify languages, but it should be noted that due to the inherently flexible nature of grammar, these are only ever really just conventions. One way to classify language is based on how meaning is added on to words. Latin and German, inflectional languages, rely largely on suffixes to indicate the subject in verbs and show the case in nouns whereas with nouns in English depend on prepositions and word-order. Other languages take this even further with agglutination, such as in Turkish or Hungarian with verbal meaning indicated with long strings of infixes and suffixes, and the furthest still with synthetic and polysynthetic languages like Greenlandic. In these languages, entire clauses can be just one or two words. Meanwhile, in Mandarin everything from number, tense, etc. relies on using separate words, and it is said that comparatively this is easier to learn for adults than a polysynthetic language would be. Languages tend to shift closer to analytic structure, evidenced with modern Romance languages not having inflected nouns like Latin.