Joseph Greenberg (1960) proposed measuring a language's morphological type quantitatively from a sample text, instead of sorting languages into fixed boxes like "agglutinative" or "isolating". Three of his indices:
Synthesis S = M / W (morphemes per word)
Agglutination A = Agg / J (agglutinative boundaries / total morpheme boundaries)
Isolation I = P / W (single-morpheme words / total words)
A boundary is agglutinative when each morpheme keeps a clean, invariant shape and carries one meaning (Turkish ev-ler-de "house-PL-LOC"). It is fusional when one morph packs several meanings together with a blurred boundary (Latin am-ō fuses 1st-person, singular and present tense into a single ending). Neither changes how many morphemes there are -- only how cleanly they segment.
- + Prefix / + Suffix (agglutinative) -- attaches a clean, one-meaning morpheme to the active word. Raises Synthesis, pulls Agglutination toward 1.
- + Fused suffix (fusional) -- attaches a portmanteau morph that blurs into the root. Raises Synthesis, pulls Agglutination toward 0.
- + New isolate word -- starts a fresh one-morpheme word (like Vietnamese tôi ăn cơm, each word = one morpheme). Raises word count and Isolation, dilutes Synthesis.
- Auto-build runs several of the above steps at once, weighted by the Fusional bias and New-isolate frequency sliders -- useful for quickly sketching a whole "sentence" and watching the point sweep across the plot.
The glowing point is Your Language, plotted live on a 2D projection of the same space with a trail of every state it passed through (length set by the Trail slider). Switch which pair of indices is plotted with the radio buttons above. The seven fixed points are real language families placed at their typical, approximate index values -- isolating languages cluster near the origin, agglutinative languages stack high on the Agglutination axis, and polysynthetic languages push furthest out on Synthesis. Drag the plot to pan and scroll/pinch to zoom.