In which several morphemes (some times also called monemes) are added to a noun or verb to denote case, number, gender, person, tense, etc. Words are a combination of roots and stems, to a degree which can be surprising to English speakers. In Turkish you can say "Cekoslavakyalilastiramadiklarimizdan misiniz" which means:
Are you one of those that we could not have possibly turned into a Czechoslovakian? (Eek!)
Cekoslovak: Czechoslovak
yali: -ian
lastir: to turn into
ma: not (a is just a connection letter here)
di: past tense specifier in turned
k: "we" specifier for the verb turn
lar: plural specifier for those
mi: not (i is just a connection letter here)
z: "plural you" specifier for could
dan: one of (or from, like I'm from Turkey)
misiniz: are you? (formally, it's written separately as cek..... misiniz?)
Ok, I'm exhausted even if I'm a Turk. This is just a possible combination, but we don't daily use that kind of thing. --
SavasAlparslan
Examples: Sumerian, Basque, Turkish, Finnish, Hungarian, the Caucasian languages, most American languages,
KiSwahili, and Klingon.
The opposite would be an
AnalyticLanguage. No language is totally analytical or totally agglutinative, it is a question of degree. English for example is a fairly
AnalyticLanguage but still has agglutinative elements.
The opposite is usually called inflective...
- No, actually "opposite" is merely ill-defined here.
Is
WelshLanguage considered an
AgglutinativeLanguage? Witness
LlanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwyllLlantysiliogogogoch.
To me, that seems to be stretching the definition of
word. Although there are no spaces, that hardly constitutes a
single unit of language - at least to my simple mind.
(See CulturalRelativist) (But I'm glad you pointed it out. I had no idea how wonderfully colorful the Turkish language is.)
- Oh, has a widely agreed upon definition of "word" finally been achieved in theoretical linguistics? Kindly enlighten us. Or, if you are operating simply on the basis of your intuitions from being a speaker of English, yes, that is simple-minded...or more accurately, very parochial. This kind of complex compound word building is very common in languages world-wide.
- See e.g. ISBN 0521818990 for recent research on what is a "word"; it's a difficult issue.
Question moved from
WikiNameInRealLifeSyndrome:
What is an AgglutinativeLanguage? [answered] I take it that it involves the use of compound words, but to what extent do they have to be part of the language before it is considered agglutinative? [not explicitly answered but looks like 'yes']
- This question is too incoherent to answer; please rephrase. However, "agglutinative" and "uses compound words" are not even close to being synonyms, so I think that incorrect things are being assumed even before the question is phrased.
See also
ConcatenativeLanguage (I assume if we translate that concept to natural languages we get things like composita in German: take two any words and join them together to form a new word with a meaning derived from its parts)
That's a creative thought. But I don't think any ConcatenativeLanguages do that. Forth, for instance, has been claimed to build sentences. Not compound words.
Natural languages are very strange and complex creatures, every single one of them (notwithstanding objections from native speakers regarding them intuitively rather than from the vantage of linguistics). Any and all parallels with computer languages are doomed to be sharply flawed.
I agree. Analogies are just that: Analogies. You cannot use them to prove anything, but only use them for inspiration.
The only programming language I can think of that really is agglutinative is
JayLanguage. There are standard symbols you can add to any function to transform it, such as "inverse". Also the notion of adding '.' or ':' to standard operators to obtain related operators seems agglutinative. Although perhaps the idea of syntactic
sigils, such as '$' and '@' in
PerlLanguage and
RubyLanguage are also agglutinative (see
TheProblemWithSigils).
Oh, and of course
EtcLanguage, where this is known as "adhesive style".
CategoryNaturalLanguage