Following Sapir 's understanding of Polysynthesis where the former term was applied to languages with a very small number of morphemes of which all other lexical units are composed .
Polysynthesis is his student Benjamin Lee Whorf proposed a distinction between oligosynthetic and polysynthetic languages .
Following Sapir 's understanding of Polysynthesis , his student Benjamin Lee Whorf proposed a distinction between oligosynthetic and polysynthetic languages , where the former term was applied to languages with a very small number of morphemes of which all other lexical units are composed .