Fundamental Properties (FP) of Languages: (8)

Phonetic Languages (PL) vs Ideographic Languages (IL);

(Syntax)

In this section, we will primarily define syntactic rules in synthetic languages, agglutinative languages, fusional languages, and analytic languages, with a specific focus on ideographic languages, such as Chinese, which is a unique analytic language.

As we know, different languages have distinct syntactic rules, and understanding these rules is essential for discovering the fundamental properties of languages. Currently, most research has been conducted on syntactic rules among phonetic languages (PL), which are synthetic, agglutinative, fusional, and analytic languages. In most phonetic languages,  words are formed by combining morphemes (prefixes, suffixes, or infixes) indicating grammatical relationships and specific meanings. Furthermore, a single word in phonetic languages, could be inflected with tense, mood, person, number, case, gender, and other grammatical features. Some phonetic languages have more infections than other languages, thus  making them harder to learn. 

We will examine and explore the similarities and differences between phonetic languages and ideographic languages in terms of ease or flexibility in learning different languages. Chinese, an ideographic language, functions as an analytic language without inflections, making it relatively simple and easy to learn, especially for native speakers of Chinese languages. The details of the characteristics of the Chinese language will be discussed in the next section.

(To be continued)