Among all the languages existing in the world, there is a group whose representatives are perhaps one of the most exotic for the Russian person, as well as for most of the inhabitants of Europe. For an ear unfamiliar with the sound of such long words, the speech of foreigners may seem ridiculous or even meaningless.
This is about incorporating languages.
Definition
Incorporating languages are such means of communication in which there is no division of speech into sentences and words in their traditional sense. Instead, linguists involved in these languages use different concepts. They usually call the smallest lexical and syntactic units of these means of communication words-sentences. That is, such a construction expresses the meaning of the whole sentence or phrase (in some cases). But it cannot be divided into separate words. Its parsing (according to sentence members) is also impossible.
main feature
These sentence words are usually written together and outwardly resemble very long words, the number of letters in which can easily reach several tens. Such constructions can be conditionally divided into several roots. But unlike the words of the Russian language, which are formed by such a merger, not all of their parts can be used in speech independently.
Stress
Another striking distinctive feature of incorporating languages is a single stress for the whole sentence (which is also a word).
Many readers of this article will probably ask: why parts of these long sentence words cannot be written separately, as in most languages of the world?
This cannot be done for several reasons, chief among which are the following:
- In such sentences, as already mentioned, the emphasis falls on only one syllable. And such a characteristic is usually possessed by words.
- It is impossible to divide such sentences into separate words, because the morphemes that make up them, although they have a certain meaning, cannot be used independently, as separate lexical units.
Not to be confused
Often isolating and incorporating languages are confused with each other. Perhaps this is due to the consonance of these terms, and maybe for some other reason.
Therefore, in this article, the concept of isolating languages must also be cited.
These are the means of communication in which the word, as a rule, consists of one single morpheme, with rare exceptions. They usually do not change in any way. That is, these short words cannot bow or conjugate. The same word can have a huge number of meanings. The difference is in pronunciation.
For example, in Chinese, a term can have up to several dozen completely different meanings.
Classification principle
One of the signs, according to which it is customary to distinguish between languages, is as follows.
Means of communication are distinguished from each other by the number of morphemes in words. For example, if in a language most of the lexical units has only a root, then we can say that in it the ratio of morphemes and words is 1: 1. It is best to understand this with examples from the Russian language. So, the word "throne" contains one part - the root. So, according to the above principle, it has a value of 1: 1. There are already three morphemes in the word "house". “Home” is the root, “ik” is the suffix and “a” is the ending.
In Chinese, Korean and some other languages, which are commonly referred to as isolating, this ratio has a value of 1: 1 or close to it.
Incorporating languages can be called their complete opposite. Here, most words have many morphemes. Each of them has a meaning close to a single word.
Not related, but similar languages, in which new words are formed by adding various morphemes to the roots, are called synthetic. These include Russian. In turn, this subgroup has two more varieties. Languages belonging to the first of them are called inflective. And again it should be said that the state language of our country refers to this particular variety.
Word formation
In such languages, the form of the word (i.e., number, case, and other characteristics) may change. This process usually involves prefixes and affixes. For example, if the ending "a" is added to the word "house", then it will acquire the meaning of multiplicity. But the ending "a" is not in all cases a sign of a number. For example, in the word "table" it indicates that it is represented in the genitive case.
The opposite of these languages are agglutinative. The fundamental difference lies in the fact that in them each morphological element of the word is responsible for only one specific attribute, for example, a certain case, number, gender, and so on.
So, in many Turkic languages, the morpheme "lar" means the plural. Often a particular suffix or ending has its own fixed place in the token.
About the same thing happens in incorporating languages, but phonemes give the word more than just a form. They serve as members of the proposal.
Polysynthetic languages
Incorporating languages are often referred to as the term indicated in the title of this section. It was first used by Edward Sepir, a famous linguist, one of the founders of the theory of linguistic relativity.
In the Russian language, as in many others, there are examples of long words consisting of several roots and affixes for their connection. However, they are not examples of incorporation. Here are some of these lexemes: Lespromstroykhoz, magnanimous, chubby.
There is no incorporation in them, since they all consist only of the roots and other parts of the word that have the meanings of nouns and adjectives. In the meantime, in synthetic or incorporating languages, a phrase or sentence, as a rule, always contains an element that acts as a verb. The long constructions from the Russian language that were given above as examples are called compositives. Another term for this phenomenon is compound words.
They, as already noted, exist in other languages. So, in Basque there is a word that can be translated approximately as "related to those in the beret." These words also can not be called examples of polysynthetism or incorporation.
An example of the words of the Russian language that can be called the result of incorporation are the following tokens: "to do good," "to favor," and some others.
What languages are related to incorporating?
On the territory of our country there are several peoples whose languages are polysynthetic. For example, the languages of the Chukchi-Kamchatka group are incorporating.
Another striking example of such means of communication are those that are part of the Abkhaz-Adyghe group.
These languages can be called partially incorporating. Nouns in such languages are usually very simple in terms of morphological composition. The verb is connected into a single whole with all other parts of speech.
This principle of word formation is applied, not only in languages that appeared naturally. It is known that there are also artificial means of communication.
These languages are created by linguists. All of them, as a rule, have certain authors. These languages are created for a specific purpose. For example, in the past few years, a number of languages have been developed specifically for Hollywood science fiction films. Characters that are of unearthly origin sometimes speak their own dialects in such films.
Sometimes these new languages turn from a simple cinematic effect into something more.
Unusual languages
For example, some works of world classical literature have already been translated into the language of aliens from the films of the Star Wars series.
Among the artificial, there are also communication tools designed specifically for use in any field of science. A number of languages are known, bearing a single common name - philosophical.
The American scientist John Quihada is the author of the Ifcuil communication tool, which is an example of an incorporated language. The linguist was sure that with the help of his system one can express thoughts more accurately than in any other language. Ithkuil refers to incorporating means of communication.
Therefore, we can assume that, despite their relative complexity, polysynthetic languages have certain advantages, since the system on which they are based was chosen by one of the creators of modern philosophical languages for their creation.
Information about the incorporating type of languages may be useful to specialists in this field, students and other people.