User:Anc67010/sandbox

Wiki Topic 2

Morphological Typology

    If languages in langauge families are categorized by similar morphological features, how do languages who don't have a direct language family (such as Japanese and Korean), get classified?
    What features are distinctive of the various categories?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morphological_typology

Wiki Discussion 2: Morphological Typology

1. This article is rated top-importance in the WikiProject Linguistics scale, and has a C-class level. According to the quality scale, C-class articles are those that have a good start on a topic and is good for the layman, as a casual introduction to the topic, however is missing some crucial elements to the issue.

2. The issues that the comments address are: Where English lies in this classification of morphological typology; if there are other fusional groups; if there are suprasegmental features; the fact that there is some confusion over the terminology used; and just general issues with the article (the general terminology is not accurate and should not be used to categorize the entire article).

3. Regarding the issue about English, and its role in morphological typology: the discussion mentions that English is both analytic and synthetic, or only analytic, or analytic and fusional. It compared English to other languages (such as French and Mandarin Chinese) to place it on a spectrum of synthetic-ness. There is only a brief debate on this issue, and since four different people find different things to be true, there isn’t currently a solution to this issue, but it isn’t extremely important, as it isn’t mentioned in the article in the first place. Regarding the other issues (inaccurate terminology used to categorize the article): it is mentioned that it’s not enough to simply classify a language by a type or morphology—all languages are made up of different morphemes and types of morphology, and should therefore be broken down into specific morphemes as a way to classify. While this makes sense, there isn’t very much scholarly support saying that this way of classification is important, and therefore shouldn’t matter how it is classified.

4. I believe we have briefly mentioned typology in passing, however I don’t feel like I have a good enough understanding of the field itself to argue whether these discussions are right or wrong. After reading through the discourse, I agree with the arguments that take lead on the issues—but again there isn’t much disagreement, and I don’t have much previous knowledge on the subject, so I have no reason to disagree either.

5. From reading this talk page, I feel that the article is a good start to an interesting topic, however there needs to be more information included for the article to carry more weight. Instead of looking through these issues with a fine-tooth comb, someone has left this article in all of its vagueness. It left me with more questions than when I started.