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A synthetic language has many morphemes per word, while an isolating language has few. English is towards the isolating end, while Hungarian and Finnish are highly synthetic. Morpheme ratios can be affected by pluralization, conjugation, and compound words. Polysynthetic languages like Mohawk can express entire sentences in one word.
A synthetic language is not the result of a chemical process involving words and various substances. It is a language that contains a large number of morphemes per word. Morphemes are the smallest units of meaning within a word. The opposite of a synthetic language is an “isolating language” which has a small number of morphemes per word. Languages with a high ratio of morphemes per word include languages such as Hungarian and Finnish which are prone to long conjugations.
Words are made up of morphemes. For example, the word “etymologically” is made up of four morphemes. These morphemes are etymologically. Just because a word is long doesn’t mean it has many morphemes. The word “conjugation” has only two morphemes: conjugation. Short words can be multi-morphemes like ‘cats’, which has a plural or a single morpheme like ‘break’.
There are a number of reasons why some languages have more morphemes than others. For example, English adds an extra morpheme that Japanese doesn’t because English pluralizes nouns. The Germanic languages are subject to a large number of morphemes because they produce a number of compound words such as “Schwarzwaldkirschetorte”, which means “Black Forest cherry pie”.
Another cause of high morpheme ratios is conjugation. While English uses a large number of pronouns and articles to give meaning to words, other languages such as Hungarian conjugate their words by adding morphemes. Such languages, including Latin, also add a wider range of morphemes such as dative and accusative morphemes.
There are, of course, different degrees of synthesis in a synthetic language and between synthetic languages. English is, relatively speaking, towards the isolating end of linguistics, but sentences can be formed with high or low levels of synthesis depending on how meaning is expressed. Chinese and Japanese are isolating languages.
At the other extreme, languages like Finnish have a high level of synthesis. This allows the language to express more information using fewer words, but it also means that words are longer and harder to pronounce. Languages cannot be judged on a single sentence, as in many languages it is possible to frame the sentence in such a way as to give it more or less the appearance of a synthetic language.
A highly synthetic language, such as Mohawk, can also be defined as a polysynthetic language. This means that words can have a large number of morphemes on a regular basis and sometimes entire sentences can be expressed using a single word. Other examples of polysynthetic languages include Ainu in Japan and Chukchi.
