1295: Oligosynthetic Languages pt. 1 Jun 27, 2018

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 polysynthetic language!

There will be more about this tomorrow, looking at some examples.