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A synthetic language, also called an inflected language, is a language which uses inflectional forms, such as noun declension and verb conjugation, as a primary means of indicating the grammatical function of the words in the sentence, often to the point where the word order in a clause is arbitrary or merely connotative. An example of a synthetic language is Latin.
Synthetic languages can be further broken down into agglutinative and fusional categories. Highly synthetic languages are called polysynthetic.
Synthetic languages contrast with analytic or isolating languages, which present the same information with word order and helper words more often than highly inflected languages do. Often in such languages, the unmodified word root is a valid word by itself. However, distinguishing helper words from prefixes or suffixes in some languages (such as Japanese) can bring difficulty.
Several Native American languages are perhaps the most highly inflected languages known. The Navajo language is famous for its use by the United States during World War II as a spoken code. Other highly inflected languages include Mohawk, Inuktitut and Nahuatl. These languages inflect words to such a degree that a single word is often translated as an entire sentence in most other languages. A Mohawk word often given as an example is Washakotya'tawitsherahetkvhta'se, which means "He made the thing that one puts on one's body ugly for her", i.e., "He ruined her dress". Such highly inflected languages are also called polysynthetic languages.
Other examples of highly inflected languages include Latin, Greek, Arabic, Czech and Russian. For instance, in Russian, which distinguishes between grammatical genders, the adjective stem odin, "one" can be inflected in the following ways:
Russian also distinguishes cases:
The endings for feminine nouns are different, and those for plural nouns different still.
On a continuum from highly inflected to highly isolating, most modern Indo-European languages lie toward the inflected end. For example, Spanish, French, German, and the North Germanic languages all inflect nouns and adjectives according to grammatical gender. These modern tongues make considerably less use of inflection than the archaic languages (such as Latin) from which they evolved.
Modern English is often cited as a language that does not use much inflection. This is true for common nouns: English nouns have no grammatical gender and case is represented by word order, although most nouns are inflected for number. But there are many exceptions among the pronouns: for example, who, whose, and whom are inflected nominative, genitive, and accusative/dative (merged during Middle English) forms of the same word. English has a great many irregular verbs (161), whose multiple forms must be memorized; these are generally more inflected than regular verbs. Consider, for example, the irregular verb write and the regular verb push: "she wrote" (past tense) and "she had written" (past perfect tense), versus "she pushed" (past tense) and "she had pushed" (past perfect tense). Modern English also has inflection of person for some verbs, e.g. "I am", "you are", "he/she/it is". These irregular constructs reflect a past in which older forms of English were much more highly inflected than modern English.
Western European languages generally tend to become less inflected over time. One source of pressure to drop inflection is the development of pidgins and creoles. Closely related languages tend to have many roots in common, but use different inflection systems. When two cultures meet, it is discovered that communication is possible simply by speaking in word roots, and dropping the inflection. The result of this process is an artificial language for interchange, called a pidgin. Sometimes the two cultures continue to mix over a long period of time, and children begin to speak the pidgin natively. This forces the language to grow, in order to provide service as a complete native language. When this happens, linguists would say that the pidgin has become a creole.
It has been suggested that English is itself a creole. Old English was a Germanic language, related to the language of Norse invaders who conquered part of England around A.D. 1000. A pidgin evolved to facilitate communication between the English and the Norse, which may have contributed to the loss of many forms of inflection used in Old English. The complete history of the English language presents some problems, but the consensus of linguists is that English has undergone this process, to a limited degree, more than once in its history.
Another reason for the loss of inflections is sound changes, such as front mutation in Old English, which can either make the declensions and conjugations irregular, or make different numbers, cases, and tenses merge.
Both these reasons, in varying degrees, contribute to the loss of old inflections.
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