Agglutination

For example, in the agglutinative language of Turkish, the word evlerinizden ("from your houses") consists of the morphemes ev-ler-i-n-iz-den.

Grammatical information expressed by adpositions in Western Indo-European languages is typically found in suffixes.

Persian has some features of agglutination, making use of prefixes and suffixes attached to the stems of verbs and nouns.

The Indonesian and Malay word mempertanggungjawabkan is formed by adding active-voice, causative and benefactive affixes to the compound verb tanggung jawab, which means "to account for".

In Tagalog (and its standardised register, Filipino), nakakapágpabagabag ("that which is upsetting/disturbing") is formed from the root bagabag ("upsetting" or "disquieting").

Japanese is also an agglutinating language, like Korean, adding information such as negation, passive voice, past tense, honorific degree and causality in the verb form.

Common examples would be hatarakaseraretara (働かせられたら), which combines causative, passive or potential, and conditional conjugations to arrive at two meanings depending on context "if (subject) had been made to work..." and "if (subject) could make (object) work", and tabetakunakatta (食べたくなかった), which combines desire, negation, and past tense conjugations to mean "I/he/she/they did not want to eat".

Conversely, Navajo contains affixes for some uses, but overlays them in such unpredictable and inseparable ways that it is often referred to as a fusional language.

[citation needed] As noted above, it is a typical feature of agglutinative languages that there is a one-to-one correspondence between suffixes and syntactic categories.

For example, a finite Korean verb has seven slots (the inner round brackets indicate parts of morphemes which may be omitted in some phonological environments):[4] Moreover, passive and causative verbal forms can be derived by adding suffixes to the base, which could be seen as the null-th slot.

For each noun class, there are specific singular and plural prefixes, which also serve as markers of agreement between the subject and the verb.

[5] The following sentences may be formed: yu-le1SG-thatm-tu1SG-personm-moja1SG-onem-refu1SG-talla-li1SG-he-pasty-e7SG-REL-itki-soma7SG-readki-le7SG-thatki-tabu7SG-bookki-refu7SG-longyu-le m-tu m-moja m-refu a-li y-e ki-soma ki-le ki-tabu ki-refu1SG-that 1SG-person 1SG-one 1SG-tall 1SG-he-past 7SG-REL-it 7SG-read 7SG-that 7SG-book 7SG-long'That one tall person who read that long book.

'wa-le1PL-thatwa-tu1PL-personwa-wili1PL-twowa-refu1PL-tallwa-li1PL-he-past(w)-o7PL-REL-itvi-soma7PL-readvi-le7PL-thatvi-tabu7PL-bookvi-refu7PL-longwa-le wa-tu wa-wili wa-refu wa-li (w)-o vi-soma vi-le vi-tabu vi-refu1PL-that 1PL-person 1PL-two 1PL-tall 1PL-he-past 7PL-REL-it 7PL-read 7PL-that 7PL-book 7PL-long'Those two tall people who read those long books.

'The American linguist Joseph Harold Greenberg in his 1960 paper proposed to use the so-called agglutinative index to calculate a numerical value that would allow a researcher to compare the "degree of agglutitativeness" of various languages.

Here is a table of sample values:[9] The one-to-one relationship between an affix and its grammatical function may be somewhat complicated by the phonological processes active in the given language.

For example, the official Guinness world record is Finnish epäjärjestelmällistyttämättömyydellänsäkäänköhän "I wonder if – even with his/her quality of not having been made unsystematized".

The remaining are bound morphemes for negation (не, a proclitic, otherwise written separately in verbs), noun intensifier (-ателств), noun-to-verb conversion (-ува), imperative mood second person plural ending (-йте).

It is rather unusual, but finds some usage, e.g. newspaper headlines on 13 July 1991, the day after the current Bulgarian constitution was adopted with much controversy and debate, and even scandals.

In linguistics, these words have been in use since 1836, when Wilhelm von Humboldt's posthumously published work Über die Verschiedenheit des menschlichen Sprachbaues und ihren Einfluß auf die geistige Entwicklung des Menschengeschlechts [lit.

(Agglutination...) consists of the welding together of two or more terms constantly occurring as a syntagmatic group into a single unit, which becomes either difficult or impossible to analyse thereafter.

In English, on the other hand, apart from rare combinations such as good-bye from God be with you, walnut from Wales nut, window from wind-eye (O.N.

In the case of agglutinative languages, the main obstacle lies in the large number of word forms that can be obtained from a single root.

Although the basic one-to-one relationship between form and syntactic function is not broken in Finnish, the authoritative institution Institute for the Languages of Finland (Kotus) lists 51 declension types for Finnish nouns, adjectives, pronouns, and numerals.

In an agglutinative language, where several suffixes are concatenated at the end of the word, the number of different divisions which have to be checked for consistency is large.

The possibility of an Altaic family, comprising Turkic, Mongolian, and Tungusic, is rather widely accepted, and some scholars would advocate increasing the size of this family by adding some or all of Uralic, Korean and Japanese.For instance, the study of word order universals by Greenberg ("Some Universals of Grammar with Particular Reference to the Order of meaningful Elements", in J. H. Greenberg (ed.

Many earlier attempts at establishing wide-ranging genetic relationships suffer precisely from failure to take this property of typological patterns into account.

Koncovky jsou většinou fonologicky redukovány, takže ztrácejí slabičnou samostatnost.However, it is not the morphology itself (not even for inflective or agglutinative languages) that is causing the headache – with today's cheap space and power, simply listing all the thinkable forms in an appropriately hashed list is o.k.

– but it's the disambiguation problem, which is apparently more difficult for such morphologically rich languages (perhaps surprisingly more for the inflective ones than agglutinative ones) than for the analytical ones.

The middle sign is in Hungarian , which agglutinates extensively. (The top and bottom signs are in Romanian and German , respectively, both inflecting languages .) The English translation is "Ministry of Food and Agriculture: Satu Mare County Directorate General of Food and Agriculture".
A sign in Spanish, English and Kichwa , an agglutinative language.