| Agglutinative |
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| agglutinative languages | |
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An agglutinative language is a Language in which the Word s are formed by joining Morpheme s together. This term was introduced by Wilhelm Von Humboldt in 1836 to classify languages from a Morphological point of view. It was derived from the Latin verb ''agglutinare'', which means "to glue together". An agglutinative language is a form of Synthetic Language where each Affix typically represents one unit of meaning (such as "diminutive", "past tense", "plural", etc.), and bound morphemes are expressed by affixes (and not by internal changes of the root of the word, or changes in stress or tone). Besides, and most importantly, in an agglutinative language affixes do not become fused with others, and do not change form conditioned by others. Synthetic languages which are not agglutinative are called Fusional Language s; they sometimes combine affixes by "squeezing" them together, often changing them drastically in the process, and joining several meanings in one affix (for example, in the Spanish word comí ''I ate'', the suffix -'''í''' carries the meanings of indicative Mood , past Tense , first person singular Subject and perfect Aspect ). ''Agglutinative'' is sometimes used as a synonym for , Dutch . Agglutinative languages tend to have a high rate of affixes/morphemes per word, and to be very regular. For example, Japanese has only three irregular verbs (and not ''very'' irregular), Nahuatl only two. Georgian is an exception; not only is it highly agglutinative (there can be simultaneously up to 8 morphemes per word), but there are also significant number of irregular verbs, varying in degrees of irregularity. EXAMPLES OF AGGLUTINATIVE LANGUAGES Examples of agglutinative languages are the Altaic Languages (see Turkish ), Basque , the Dravidian Languages , the Uralic Languages , Inuktitut , Swahili , Zulu , Malay , the Northeast , Northwest and South Caucasian languages, and some Mesoamerican and native North American languages including Nahuatl , Huastec , and Salish . In the past, most of the Ancient Near East and what is now Iran also spoke such languages, like Sumerian , Elamite , Hurrian , Urartian , Hattic , Gutian , Lullubi , Punjabi and Kassite . Examples of agglutinative Constructed Language are Klingon and Tolkien's Black Speech of Mordor. Agglutinative languages are not entirely grouped by the family (although Finnish , Estonian and Hungarian are definitely related, and it is often posited that Japanese and Korean are related). It is possible that Convergent Evolution had many separate languages develop this property, but there seems to exist a preferred evolutionary direction from agglutinative synthetic languages to fusional synthetic languages, and then to non-synthetic languages, which in their turn evolve again into agglutinative synthetic languages. Many Tibeto-Burman Languages are also agglutinative. SEE ALSO REFERENCES |
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