1 Examples

Several Native American languages are perhaps the most highly synthetic languages known. The Navajo language is famous for its use by the United States during World War II as a spoken code. Other highly synthetic languages include MohawkMohawk is a Native American language spoken in the United States and Canada. It is part of the Iroquoian family. Phonology Based on sound files available at http://www. ohwejagehka. htm, the phoneme inventory appears to be as follows (using SAMPA notation, Inuktitut and Nahuatl. These languages inflect words to such a degree that a single word is often translated as an entire sentence in most other languages. A Mohawk word often given as an example is Washakotya'tawitsherahetkvhta'se, which means "He made the thing that one puts on one's body ugly for her", i.e., "He ruined her dress". Such highly synthetic languages are also called polysynthetic languages.

Other examples of highly synthetic languages include Latin, GreekThe Greek language ( /Elini'k{/) is an Indo-European language which has existed from around the 14th century BC in the Cretan inscriptions called Linear B. Mycenaean Greek of this period is distinguished from later Classical or Ancient Greek of the 8th ce, ArabicArabic is a Semitic language, fairly closely related to, for instance, the Hebrew language and the Aramaic language, spoken throughout the Arab world and widely known outside it. It has been a literary language for over 1500 years, and is the liturgical l, CzechLanguages of the Czech Republic Slavic languages The Czech language is one of the West Slavic languages, along with Slovak, Polish, Pomeranian, and Sorbian. It is spoken by most people in the Czech Republic and by Czechs all over the world (about 12 milli and Russian. For instance, in Russian, which distinguishes between grammatical genders, the adjective stem odin, "one" can be inflected in the following ways:

• odna tarelka - one plate (feminine)
• odno derevo - one tree (neuter)
• odin stol - one table (masculine)

Russian also distinguishes cases:

• odin stol - one table ( nominative or accusative)
• odnogo stola (pr. "odnovo") - of one table ( genitive)
• odnomu stolu - to one table ( dative)
• odnim stolom - with one table ( instrumental)
• v/na odnom stole - at/in/on one table ( locative)

The endings for feminine nouns are different, and those for plural nouns different still.

2 Indo-European languages

On a continuum from highly synthetic to highly isolating, most modern Indo-European languages lie toward the synthetic end. For example, Spanish, French, German, and the North Germanic languages all inflect nouns and adjectives according to grammatical gender. These modern tongues make considerably less use of inflection than the archaic languages (such as Latin) from which they evolved.

Modern English is often cited as a language that does not use much inflection. This is true for common nouns: English nouns have no grammatical gender and case is represented by word order (except the genitive, i.e. "the dog's"), although most nouns are inflected for number. But there are many exceptions among the pronouns: for example, who, whose, and whom are inflected nominative, genitive, and accusative/dative (merged during Middle English) forms of the same word. English has a great many irregular verbs (161), whose multiple forms must be memorized; these are generally more inflected than regular verbs. Consider, for example, the irregular verb write and the regular verb push: "she wrote" (past tense) and "she had written" (past perfect tense), versus "she pushed" (past tense) and "she had pushed" (past perfect tense). Modern English also has inflection of person for some verbs, e.g. "I am", "you are", "he/she/it is". These irregular constructs reflect a past in which older forms of English were much more highly synthetic than modern English.

Western European languages generally tend to become less synthetic over time. One source of pressure to drop inflection is the development of pidgins and creoles. Closely related languages tend to have many roots in common, but use different inflection systems. When two cultures meet, it is discovered that communication is possible simply by speaking in word roots, and dropping the inflection. The result of this process is an artificial language for interchange, called a pidgin. Sometimes the two cultures continue to mix over a long period of time, and children begin to speak the pidgin natively. This forces the language to grow, in order to provide service as a complete native language. When this happens, linguists would say that the pidgin has become a creole.

It has been suggested that English is itself a creole. Old English was a Germanic language, related to the language of Norse invaders who conquered part of England around A.D. 1000. A pidgin evolved to facilitate communication between the English and the Norse, which may have contributed to the loss of many forms of inflection used in Old English. The complete history of the English language presents some problems, but the consensus of linguists is that English has undergone this process, to a limited degree, more than once in its history.

Another reason for the loss of inflections is sound changes, such as front mutation in Old English, which can either make the declensions and conjugations irregular, or make different numbers, cases, and tenses merge.

Both these reasons, in varying degrees, contribute to the loss of old inflections.

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