
10 Analytic and Synthetic “Architectural Languages”
Prof. Hardy’s comparison of an architectural tradition with a language suggests the linguist Noam Chomsky’s concept of “transformational generative grammar,” which enables new meanings beyond mere “semantic” denotation or definition. Linguists traditionally divide language into two broad categories depending on how they execute these syntactical functions: 1) synthetic or “fusing” languages which inflect, that is, make internal changes or add affixes to their words and 2) analytic or “isolating” languages which string their “invariant” words together using particles. Substituting ”aedicule” for “word” (a large leap,) the Karnata Dravida “architectural language” might be seen as altering its aedicules through Prof Hardy’s eight modes of “aedicular expansion,” analogous to synthetic or inflecting languages like Latin or Sanskrit. Khmer architecture with its “invariant” (unchanging) prasats linked by galleries, might then be compared with “analytic” languages, such as English or Chinese, (although its “vocabulary” is very limited.) Another way of conceiving “architectural languages” might be as rhetoric with their syntactical operations performed through tropes, “figures of speech” or “of space” which perform “architextural” transformations, such as staggering, stellation, hybridization, repeating bays, linear extension and concentric or isomorphic (homologous) expansion.