Agglutination

Agglutination is a linguistic process pertaining to derivational morphology in which complex words are formed by stringing together morphemes without changing them in spelling or phonetics. Languages that use agglutination widely are called agglutinative languages. An example of such a language is Turkish, where for example, the word evlerinizden, or 'from your houses', consists of the morphemes ev-ler-iniz-den with the meanings house-plural-your-from. Agglutinative languages are often contrasted both with languages in which syntactic structure is expressed solely by means of word order and auxiliary words (isolating languages) and with languages in which a single affix typically expresses several syntactic categories and a single category may be expressed by several different affixes (as is the case in inflectional (fusional) languages). However, both fusional and isolating languages may use agglutination in the most-often-used constructs, and use agglutination heavily in certain contexts, such as word derivation. This is the case in English, which has an agglutinated plural marker -(e)s and derived words such as shame·less·ness. Agglutinative suffixes are often inserted irrespective of syllabic boundaries, for example, by adding a consonant to the syllable coda as in English tie – ties. Agglutinative languages also have large inventories of enclitics, which can be and are separated from the word root by native speakers in daily usage. Note that the term agglutination is sometimes used more generally to refer to the morphological process of adding suffixes or other morphemes to the base of a word. This is treated in more detail in the section on other uses of the term. Although agglutination is characteristic of certain language families, this does not mean that when several languages in a certain geographic area are all agglutinative, they are necessarily related phylogenetically. In particular, such a conclusion formerly led linguists to propose the so-called Ural–Altaic language family, which would (in the largest scope ever proposed) include the Uralic and Turkic languages as well as Mongolian, Korean, Tamil and Japanese. However, contemporary linguistics views this proposal as controversial. On the other hand, it is also the case that some languages that have developed from agglutinative proto-languages have lost this feature. For example, contemporary Estonian, which is so closely related to Finnish that the two languages are mutually intelligible, has shifted towards the fusional type. (It has also lost other features typical of the Uralic families, such as vowel harmony.) Examples of agglutinative languages include the Uralic languages, such as Finnish, Estonian, and Hungarian. These have highly agglutinated expressions in daily usage, and most words are bisyllabic or longer. Grammatical information expressed by adpositions in Western Indo-European languages is typically found in suffixes. Hungarian uses extensive agglutination in almost all and any part of it. The suffixes follow each other in special order based on the role of the suffix, and can be heaped in extreme amount, resulting words conveying complex meanings in very compact form. An example is fiaiéi where the root 'fi-' means 'son', the subsequent four vowels are all separate suffixes, and the whole word means ' of his/her sons'. The nested possessive structure and expression of plurals is quite remarkable (note that Hungarian uses no genders).