Morphological Typology Space

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help-ingroot + 1 agglutinative suffix

Typology Indices

Synthesis M/W1.50

Agglutination A/J1.00

Isolation P/W0.50

Words / morphemes2 / 3

How it works

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.

The glowing point is Your Language, plotted live at (Synthesis, Agglutination, Isolation) with a trail of every state it passed through. 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.

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