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