Chinese Studies

II. Some distinctive features of Chinese

Chinese is an isolating/analytic language morphologically and syntactically, in contrast with English, French, Spanish, etc. which are Inflected Langauges, and with Japanese, Korean, Finnish, etc. which are Agglutinative Languages.

First of all, there are very few prefixes and suffixes in Chinese, and it generally lacks complexity in word formation. While the majority of words are disyllabic in modern Chinese, it is true that still many words in Chinese consist of one syllable/one morpheme (the smallest unit of meaning in a word) only. In other words, quite a number of monosyllabic morphemes are words by themselves -- a characteristic typical to isolating/analytic languages.

Secondly, there is no conjugation in Chinese, that is, no inflection (of a verb) in its forms for distinctions such as gender, number, person, case, mood, or tense. Usually words remain unchanged in form whether they refer to singular or plural (not in the case of pronouns though), male or female, first or third person, a subject or an object, indicative or subjunctive mood, actions in the past or at present. Take the following sentences for example:

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