Sorry about not answering your questions. I didn't have a lot of time earlier, but I'll try to see what I can do. However, answering some of your questions would take a basic course in linguistics to introduce you to concepts that would help you understand the answers. How much phonetics, phonology, and morphology have you studied in the past? For most people, the answer would be "none". Linguistics simply isn't taught in most schools, and it is almost never a required subject. Not every university even has a linguistics department.
Some people have proposed a cycle: isolating -> agglutinative -> fusional -> isolating again, but that seems too schematic.
As to which is easiest to learn, isolating and agglutinating morphologies are roughly equivalent, because they are both very modular, both easy to decompose into parts. Fusional morphology is more difficult, since it is less modular.
As an interested layman, I have some questions and comments.
First, some write-ups insist on adding additional morphological types (polysynthetic and possibly analytic) to the {isolating, agglutinative, fusional} trio. Would I be out-of-line to focus on the trio and dismiss these additions as unnecessary complications?
No, but think of polysynthetic languages as those that pile lots of affixes (suffixes, infixes, prefixes) on verbs to designate roles that other languages might use separate words (pronouns, noun phrases) to express. Agglutinative languages tend to string affixes together on words, where each affix has a single grammatical function (e.g. plurality or definiteness, but not both). Fusional (or inflectional) languages tend to pile more meanings into an affix (e.g. the -s suffix in "puts" carries both third person and singular designations). Isolating languages tend to require separate words to express grammatical functions rather than affixes. No language really fits perfectly into any of these categories, and linguistic typology these days is much more sophisticated than in the early twentieth century when the morphological types were popular. So it can be misleading to take these categories too seriously.
I usually think of a word as containing one or more syllables, and in agglutinative or fusional languages a word often contains many syllables. But what about "Qu'est-ce qu'il y a' — seven words of French using just three syllables? Or English "wun-chal" ("Wouldn't you all") — four words in just 2 syllables? Of course, the former is taught as Standard French, while the latter is colloquial; does this make a difference to linguists?
Really tough to answer this question without explaining the difference between
phonology and
morphoponology.
Phonology is basically about coordinating articulatory gestures during speech. Speech is sequential, so think of it in terms of articulating strings of words, where each word consists of a string of phonemes (basic speech sounds). Those phoneme strings are produced in rhythmic groups, which poets create artistic patterns from. Those rhythmic groups are composed of syllables. So you can slow down or speed up, articulate carefully or casually, sing, or whisper those strings of sounds. That's what phonology is about, and knowing that is part of the answer to the question.
Now consider that string of sounds that you try to pronounce using your largely unconscious knowledge of English phonology--rules governing articulatory gestures. You can monkey around with that string of sounds. Children do this in language games all the time, for example, in Pig Latin. When you say the plural of
book, you add the suffix
-s to the word:
books. But if you say the plural of
knife, you change the stem to
knive and add
-s (actually the phoneme /z/). English phonology makes sure that. So you manipulate the string of phonemes
before you try to articulate the word. Phonology is what happens as you try to articulate.
Morphophonology involves manipulating strings of phonemes that make up the words.
So you want to know why
wouldn't you all can be pronounced casually like one word:
wunchall. Good question. It involves both changing the string of phonemes and modifying they way you articulate that string--i.e. morphophonology + phonology.
Would not gets replaced by a contraction
wouldn't. Unstressed
you gets replace by
ya in casual speech. That's morphophonology. Now kick in phonology. A /t/ followed by an /y/ in the same syllable gets pronounced
ch by a phonological process that we call "palatalization". Very common in English, doncha think? And, of course,
ya +
all coalesces into
yall in casual English. Hence,
wunchall.
Had enough? Am I tiring you out? I could explain what is going on in French. It's the same kind of interplay between morphophonological and phonological processes. The brain arranges a string of words that consists of strings of phonemes. The phoneme string gets packed into rhythmic units (meter and syllables) that then get run through a phonological filter to produce an acoustic output. Listeners use their knowledge and expectations to help them decode the acoustic signal back into words and phrases.
And are those examples "fusion", or something else? I remember the time a Frenchman asked me the single-syllable question "D'où?" and it took me a moment to figure out what he was asking. (My French teacher would have asked the less ambiguous "D'où venez-vous?")
I don't think that the morphological typology is useful in answering your question, but I think I've already addressed it. The morphophonological and phonological systems in French are quite different from English. For one thing, English is a stress-timed language rhythmically. So speakers time their articulation to pronounce strings of syllables that are of equal length between stress peaks. French is syllable-timed. That is, unlike with English, each syllable is pronounce with roughly equal length, and stress is almost always on the last syllable. In English, the placement of stress is more complicated.
D'où is just a contraction of
de + où. In that speech context, you can guess the meaning without needing to say
venez-vous.
I think Thai might be the most isolating of all languages!
. (This is, I'll guess, one reason it is so VERY easy to learn.) Chinese (Mandarin?) seems to be the go-to example for very isolating language, and I know no Chinese. But I have read journal papers that treat Chinese and Thai as examples of isolating languages undergoing grammaticalization and they show that Chinese is further along in that part of the cycle. (And write "15–25% of lexemes produced by the Thai speakers were complex, with a mean of about 20% as shown. By contrast, 44–57% of lexemes produced by the Chinese speakers are complex, with a mean of about 52%.")
The evolutionary hierarchy that lpetrich posted is a fairly old one that isn't taken very seriously in modern linguistics. Thai and Chinese are tone languages, and that tends to play a role in their morphophonological and phonological systems. Neither language tends to use affixes (i.e. infixes, suffixes, prefixes), although there can be exceptions to the tendency.
In fact the typical examples offered for grammaticalization in Thai are two words (โดน /don/ "bump") and (ถูก /thuuk/ "touch") which are increasingly used to mark passive voice. However (a) they are usually used only when recipient has an unfavorable outcome, and (b) the actor's noun is often placed in between the marker and the main verb. These suggest to me that this "grammaticalization" is not particularly ready for agglutination; am I right?
I haven't studied Thai or Chinese well enough to speak about what is going on there. However, I would be hesitant to say that neither language uses affixes. There are degrees of difference between compounding words and attaching affixes to words. Sometimes, compounding resembles affixation.
English is, I think, a good example of a language that uses all three structures (isolating, agglutinative, fusional) so shows that simplistic typing may be futile. Nevertheless my readings suggest that type cycling (isolating -> agglutinative -> fusional -> isolating again) may be valid as a general tendency.
I would not say that, since all languages tend to be a mixed bag of these morphological types. Languages can go pretty much in any direction when they change over time. A lot of it has to do with the way in which phonological processes erode the acoustic signal in fast and casual speech. Infants are born with a capacity to develop a phonological system, and that is essentially what causes "babytalk" in the first few years of life. They are tuning their articulatory systems to mimic adult pronunciations. However, they can only base pronunciations on what they hear. So, if adults are inserting or deleting syllables when they speak carefully or quickly, the child may have a tendency to develop a phonological system that differs from the adult ones internally but sounds roughly the same to adults as their own. Linguists call this phenomenon "rephonologization". Imperfect learning is the primary driver of language change, and that is why resistance is useless. Change is inevitable. And it doesn't always go in a predictable direction, although there are recognizable trends.
