SyntaxIn linguistics, syntax (ˈsɪntæks ) is the study of how words and morphemes combine to form larger units such as phrases and sentences. Central concerns of syntax include word order, grammatical relations, hierarchical sentence structure (constituency), agreement, the nature of crosslinguistic variation, and the relationship between form and meaning (semantics). There are numerous approaches to syntax that differ in their central assumptions and goals.
Estonian languageEstonian (eesti keel ˈeːsjti ˈkeːl) is a Finnic language and the official language of Estonia. It is written in the Latin script, and is the first language of the majority of the country's population; it is also an official language of the European Union. Estonian is spoken natively by about 1.1 million people; 922,000 people in Estonia, and 160,000 elsewhere. Estonian language belongs to the Finnic branch of the Uralic language family. Other Finnic languages include Finnish and some minority languages spoken around the Baltic Sea and in northwestern Russia.
Turkic languagesThe Turkic languages are a language family of over 35 documented languages, spoken by the Turkic peoples of Eurasia from Eastern Europe and Southern Europe to Central Asia, East Asia, North Asia (Siberia), and West Asia. The Turkic languages originated in a region of East Asia spanning from Mongolia to Northwest China, where Proto-Turkic is thought to have been spoken, from where they expanded to Central Asia and farther west during the first millennium. They are characterized as a dialect continuum.
Vowel harmonyIn phonology, vowel harmony is an assimilatory process in which the vowels of a given domain – typically a phonological word – have to be members of the same natural class (thus "in harmony"). Vowel harmony is typically long distance, meaning that the affected vowels do not need to be immediately adjacent, and there can be intervening segments between the affected vowels. Generally one vowel will trigger a shift in other vowels, either progressively or regressively, within the domain, such that the affected vowels match the relevant feature of the trigger vowel.
AgglutinationIn linguistics, agglutination is a morphological process in which words are formed by stringing together morphemes, each of which corresponds to a single syntactic feature. Languages that use agglutination widely are called agglutinative languages. For example, in the agglutinative language of Turkish, the word evlerinizden ("from your houses") consists of the morphemes ev-ler-iniz-den, literally translated morpheme-by-morpheme as house-plural-your(plural)-from.
CsángósThe Csángós (Csángók; Ceangăi) are a Hungarian ethnographic group of Roman Catholic faith living mostly in the Romanian region of Moldavia, especially in Bacău County. The region where the Csángós live in Moldavia is known as Csángó Land. Their traditional language, Csángó, an old Hungarian dialect, is currently used by only a minority of the Csángó population group. Some Csángós also live in Transylvania (around the Ghimeș-Palanca Pass and in the so-called Seven Csángó Villages) and in the village of Oituz in Northern Dobruja.
Khanty languageKhanty (also spelled Khanti or Hanti), previously known as Ostyak (ˈɒstiæk), is a Uralic language spoken in the Khanty-Mansi and Yamalo-Nenets Okrugs. There were thought to be around 7,500 speakers of Northern Khanty and 2,000 speakers of Eastern Khanty in 2010, with Southern Khanty being extinct since the early 20th century, however the total amount of speakers in the most recent census was around 13,900. The Khanty language has many dialects. The western group includes the Obdorian, Ob, and Irtysh dialects.
Mansi languageThe Mansi languages are spoken by the Mansi people in Russia along the Ob River and its tributaries, in the Khanty–Mansi Autonomous Okrug, and Sverdlovsk Oblast. Traditionally considered a single language, they constitute a branch of the Uralic languages, often considered most closely related to neighbouring Khanty and then to Hungarian. The base dialect of the Mansi literary language is the Sosva dialect, a representative of the northern language. The discussion below is based on the standard language.
Topic-prominent languageA topic-prominent language is a language that organizes its syntax to emphasize the topic–comment structure of the sentence. The term is best known in American linguistics from Charles N. Li and Sandra Thompson, who distinguished topic-prominent languages, such as Korean and Japanese, from subject-prominent languages, such as English. In Li and Thompson's (1976) view, topic-prominent languages have morphology or syntax that highlights the distinction between the topic and the comment (what is said about the topic).
Samoyedic languagesThe Samoyedic (ˌsæməˈjɛdɪk,-mɔɪ-) or Samoyed languages (ˈsæməˌjɛd,-mɔɪ-) are spoken around the Ural Mountains, in northernmost Eurasia, by approximately 25,000 people altogether. They derive from a common ancestral language called Proto-Samoyedic, and form a branch of the Uralic languages. Having separated perhaps in the last centuries BC, they are not a diverse group of languages, and are traditionally considered to be an outgroup, branching off first from the other Uralic languages.
