Editing Synthetic language (section)

===Isolating===

* [[Mandarin Chinese|Mandarin]] lacks [[Inflection|inflectional morphology]] almost entirely, and most words consist of either one- or two-syllable morphemes, especially due to the very numerous [[Compound (linguistics)|compound words]].

{| class="wikitable" style="text-align: center;"
!Chinese text
|{{lang|zh|明天}}||{{lang|zh|我}}||{{lang|zh|的}}||{{lang|zh|朋友}}||{{lang|zh|会}}||{{lang|zh|为}}||{{lang|zh|我}}||{{lang|zh|做}}||{{lang|zh|生日}}||{{lang|zh|蛋糕}}
|-
!Transliteration
|míngtiān||wǒ||de||péngyou||huì||wèi||wǒ||zuò||shēngrì||dàngāo
|-
!Literal translation
|dawn day||I||of||friend friend||will||for||I||make||birth day||egg cake
|-
!Meaning
|tomorrow|| I ||([[Grammatical particle|genitive particle]](=[[Saxon genitive|'s]]))|| friend || will ||for|| I ||make||birthday||cake 
|-
| colspan="12" | "Tomorrow my friend(s) will make a birthday cake for me."
|}

However, with rare exceptions, each syllable in Mandarin (corresponding to a single written character) represents a morpheme with an identifiable meaning, even if many of such morphemes are [[Bound morpheme|bound]]. This gives rise to the [[common misconception]] that Chinese consists exclusively of "words of one syllable". As the sentence above illustrates, however, even simple Chinese words such as ''míngtiān'' 'tomorrow' (''míng'' "next" + ''tīan'' "day") and ''péngyou'' 'friend' (a compound of ''péng'' and ''yǒu'', both of which mean 'friend') are synthetic compound words.

The Chinese language of the classic works (of [[Confucius]] for example) and southern dialects to a certain extent is more strictly monosyllabic: each character represents one word. The evolution of modern Mandarin Chinese was accompanied by a reduction in the total number of phonemes. Words which previously were phonetically distinct became homophones. Many disyllabic words in modern Mandarin are the result of joining two related words (such as péngyou, literally "friend-friend") in order  to resolve the phonetic ambiguity. A similar process is observed in some English dialects. For instance, in the [[Southern American English|Southern dialects of American English]], it is not unusual for the short vowel sounds {{IPAblink|ɪ}} and {{IPAblink|ɛ}} to be indistinguishable before [[nasal consonants]]: thus the words "pen" and "pin" are [[homophone]]s (see [[pin-pen merger]]). In these dialects, the ambiguity is often resolved by using the compounds "ink-pen" and "stick-pin", in order to clarify which "p*n" is being discussed.