Morphology

What is Morphology? Well in linguistics it is a term that refers to the formation of a language. This involves the morpheme, which is the smallest unit in a language. Sometimes it can be a word, but generally it is not. For example, The word unforgivable is three morphemes. The prefix "un-", the root forgive, and the suffix "-able." A low morpheme per word (Isolating) language means little to one morpheme representing a word (Loos, 2004). Purely Isolating Languages almost always have a ratio of morpheme to word of one. Chinese is a prime example of this. If you look at the sentence "I sold my dog yesterday," in Mandarin, "my" is two separate morphemes and yesterday is one morpheme instead of being two as in English.

Isolating Languages
• Chinese
• Thai
• Vietnamese

Synthetic Language

The other type of morphology is a Synthetic Language. It is essentially the opposite of Isolating. That means that instead of having low morpheme to word, it has a high morpheme to word ratio (Loos, 2004). This is the majority of most languages. But there are some that are far more synthetic than others. Sometimes this is to the point where literally one word can represent an idea that needs to be explained in a sentence in lower-morpheme-order languages.

For example, in Yupik, tuntussuqatarniksaitengqiggtuq is a word that consists of seven morphemes (Loos, 2004). Which of course in English is 13 words. The idea in the word expresses "He had yet to say that he was going to hunt reindeer again." This is an extreme, and falls under the category, agglutinative, literally meaning to glue together (Loos, 2004). However there is Fusional language. These similarly have a lot of morphemes per word, but are rather unintelligible. They are consisting of suffixes, root mutations, and prefixes. They are put together so well, each part cannot be deciphered unless looked upon as a whole. For example, the medical word hypercholesterolemia derived from Greek, is formed by "hyper-," meaning elevated, "cholesterol," "em," meaning blood, and "-ia" which is a grammatical ending (Loos, 2004).

Besides the morphemes being perfectly fused together, there are some languages that undergo change during conjugation. Romance languages deal with this heavily. Take the Spanish word Hablar, to speak. The stem is Habl, to express "I speak," you add an -o to form Hablo. If you wanted to express "I spoke," you add an "é" to form hablé. Some verbs require a root change when indicating tense and mood (Loos, 2004). Which of course, is very well known for Romance languages since there conjugation schemes seem to be nearly endless.

So basically you can break down into two forms of morphologies:

• Isolating
• Synthetic
• Agglutinative
• Fusional

So you decide. Do you want to speak a language that has a word for everything and grammar being the least of your problems, a language that deals with just as much grammar as you deal with now (that being English), words that contain numerous compounds, or would you rather learn a language that is involved in high context or low context? It's your decision. Go with what interests you most.

Sources
Loos, E. E. (2004). What is an isolating language?. In D. Day Jr., P. Jordan & J. Wingate (Eds.), Glossary of linguistic terms. Retrieved from http://www.sil.org/linguistics/GlossaryOfLinguisticTerms/contents.htm
Loos, E. E. (2004). What is a polysynthetic language?. In D. Day Jr., P. Jordan & J. Wingate (Eds.), Glossary of linguistic terms. Retrieved from http://www.sil.org/linguistics/GlossaryOfLinguisticTerms/WhatIsAPolysyntheticLanguage.htm

Syntax: The formation of the sentence

Basically it all boils down to the basic part of a language, the sentence. Several sentences make a paragraph. Several paragraphs make a story. We all like stories; they help us create a world of fantasy and freedom. Now all languages have stories, and they tell them differently. The chance that all languages developed the same formation is essentially zero. Less than half of the word's languages (based on population) follow a Subject-Object-Verb (SOV) formation. about the same portion uses Subject-Verb-Object (SVO). The rest of the world uses Verb-Subject-Object (VSO)(Meyer, 2010).

SOV essentially means that in a sentence, verb comes last (Boeree). In a way it similar to speaking like Yoda would. For example, if I were to say "That meal was delicious," in a standard SOV language it would become, "That meal delicious it was." "I fed my dog this morning before work," would become "My dog this morning before work I fed."

SOV Languages:
• Japanese
• Korean
• Hindi
• Turkish
• Hungarian

SVO is used in English syntax. As you read this sentence, you can clearly see its usage. This would be an easy concept for a beginner in a foreign language to grasp. If you were visiting Sweden and wanted to tell someone that you wanted to eat pizza you would say: "Jag vill äta vissa pizza." It means exactly that and no worry of having to rearrange parts of the sentence to match its order. Jag, the subject (I), vill äta, the verb (want to eat), and vissa pizza, the object (some pizza).

SVO Languages:
• Romance Languages
  • French
  • Spanish
  • Italian
• Germanic Languages
  • English
  • German
  • Swedish
  • Norwegian
• Spoken Arabic
• Greek
• Thai
• Vietnamese

The last type of syntactical formation is VSO. This mainly applies to the Semitic and Celtic languages (Boeree). "I discovered the cure" becomes "discovered I the cure." This can become confusing since there are some languages that invert their structure to VSO to form questions. English is one of them. "There is a storm today," becomes "Is there a storm today?"(Boeree)

VSO Languages:
• Semitic Languages
  • Literary Arabic
  • Hebrew
• Celtic Languages
  • Welsh
  • Gaelic
• American Indian Languages

Basically there are three main structures in use. Of course they will seem different to you, but that is normal. If you want a challenge, you could attempt Russian. It has no rules on order and all are used in common day speak (Meyer, 2010). So saying, "I like apples," "Like I apples," and "I apples like," mean the same thing.

Sources
Boeree, G. (n.d.). Basic language structures. Retrieved from http://webspace.ship.edu/cgboer/basiclangstruct.html
Meyer, C. F. (2010). Introducing English linguistics. (p. 36). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Retrieved from http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=MWbrvUiYzSkC&pg=PA36

Non Verbal Language

It may not be the first thought, but there are forms of language that require no speaking, and no writing. It can be as simple as a facial expression, or as complex as Sign Language. At first glance, most people just see "signing," the equivalent of speaking and assume that the hand-signs directly represent a simplification of the language in that country. There are many people who even fail to stop and think that Sign Language is just as rich and complex as any other language. In fact, there are many different signs, each having a base, such as Spanish, British, American, German, and French.

For example, British Sign Language (BSL) uses two hands to form the letters of the alphabet while American Sign Language (ASL) uses one (NIDCD, 2012). Despite that the UK and the US share a spoken language their sign language is similar to the difference of Chinese and Greek. This difference is due to how ASL developed its signing system from France (NIDCD, 2012). Space i.e., the area in front of the signer is used for syntax. Facial expressions and body gesture represent are used together to form meaning (Liddell, 2003). If you were to keep them in one spot, it may be interpreted as a humongous complicated and technical word. That space in front of the signer is just as vital as the spaces between words in most languages.

At homes in deaf communities, a different sign (a "type" of sign language) is used at home. This is called a home sign (NIDCD, 2012) and many families have their own. An interesting fact about these communities is that if you put several of the children with their own sign and no knowledge of any other sign in the same room, they will develop a new sign language to communicate with each other. ASL also has accent. Depending on where the signer lives, the location or space where they sign, i.e., height, will differ (Walker, 1987).

Everyone has a different way of signing, reflecting everything about their personality(NIDCD, 2012) just like how yours is revealed when you speak. Your culture, will reflect how fast you sign, just like in many countries the rate of speaking is far more elevated than in English(Liddell, 2003). Unfortunately you can't use ASL in Mexico and many other countries. A simple sign for mother, could be a nasty pejorative in another. I leave you with a video from Expert Village on a few basic expressions in ASL.

Sources
Walker, L. A. (1987). A loss for words: The story of deafness in a family. (p. 30). New York: Harper Perennial.
Liddell, Scott K. (2003). Grammar, Gesture, and Meaning in American Sign Language. Cambridge University Press.
American sign language. (2011, June). Retrieved from http://www.nidcd.nih.gov/health/hearing/pages/asl.aspx
Basic words in sign language. [Print Photo]. Retrieved from http://www.deafedge.com/image-files/basic-words-in-sign-language-hello.jpg

Visual Appeal: Ideograms

Words in a picture

Passions for language differ from everyone else. Your social life, private life, and educational life are big factors in the ability to "decipher" language. Now when I say "decipher," I am speaking of how you look at it, how you read it, and how you write it. The ability to use the artistic brain and creativeness. Those who tend to be more art oriented find it easier to utilize ideograms. Someone who is art oriented will be able to see a different side of the language that most fail to conceptualize.

Ideograms, or rather picture words, are grammatical entities that represent a sound while visually looking like a picture. Ideograms are similar to hieroglyphs, but are able to be broken down into smaller pieces (called radicals) and represent an entirely separate group with different pronunciations (Tsai, 2006). For example, the Mandarin word for "eclipse" is:
日食 (Rì shí). It is composed of two characters that mean "sun" and "eat" respectfully. If we were to speak of a lunar eclipse, it would follow similarly, 月食 (Yuè shí), "moon" and "eat"

Take a look at the image below. What do you see? You may at first just see some random Chinese character, but when I tell you it is the one for "to eat," what do you see?

Look at the top of the character, it resembles a bamboo hat. Below the hat seems to be something that represents a man holding a fish and taking a bite out of it. Do you see it now? This is the essence of an ideogram. To make things simpler, when you see a sign high in the air that resembles two golden arches, what does that mean? "McDonald's." When you see a siren wearing a crown, that represents "Starbucks" (Lewis, 2012). Fork and Knife on the side of the Interstate, that represents "restaurant." The world is literally polluted with these images, and you know more than you think. Signs from car manufacturers, fast-food restaurant chains, clothing and apparel outlets, and electronics, so many that maybe languages like Chinese and Japanese are not as foreign as one may think (Lewis, 2012).

Mandarin at first glance is overwhelming due to the strokes. When you open up a Mandarin dictionary, you will not find it alphabetized or arranged by sound. In fact, it will be arranged according to stroke count. Take in consideration the words:
water, (to) see, mouth, bamboo, one, two, and heart. In English, these words would be arranged to: bamboo, heart, mouth, one, see, two, and water. (MGBD, 2012).

But it Manda rin? No. This is how they are arranged (MGBD, 2012):
一, 二, 口, 心, 水, 竹, and 車. When transliterated, yī (one), èr (two), kǒu (mouth), xīn (heart), shuǐ (water), zhú (bamboo), and chē (cart).

There is one character to fear and love at the same time. It is so rare you would never have to memorize it; but if you ever saw it, you would know it almost instantly. The character is Biáng, and used only in the name of a noodle dish.

So much writing for so little to say? It may seem like overkill, but take a look at the characters inside, they all represent a story. This is a rarity and the most common stroke count for the most commonly used characters is eight to nine strokes. Hopefully that can allow you to relax for a bit. If you want to explore radicals and other Chinese words, I highly recommend using: MDBG Chinese-English dictionary . I have found it to be quite informative.

Sources
Lewis, B. (2012, May 1). Why chinese isn’t as hard as you think: over 8000 words of encouragement for potential learners. Retrieved from http://www.fluentin3months.com/chinese/
Tsai, C. (2006)Frequency and stroke counts of Chinese characters. Retrieved from http://technology.chtsai.org/charfreq/
MDBG. Radical/strokes lookup. (2012) Retrieved from http://www.mdbg.net/chindict/chindict.php?page=radicals