Agglutinative language

An agglutinative language structure (lat. agglutinare, stick ') is in the linguistic typology of Wilhelm von Humboldt and August Wilhelm Schlegel's a subspecies of the synthetic speech construction. In an agglutinative language, the grammatical function is indicated by the attachment of individual affixes.

In an agglutinative language is a unit of meaning, such as person, time, case, expressed by a single affix. Therein lies the difference with the fusional languages ​​that fuse different grammatical categories by affixation or have " squeezed " in the course of their development more affixes by partial drastic change. It is also important that influence the individual morphemes not mutually exclusive.

Examples

  • The Finnish word form taloissani " in my houses" can be broken down as follows: talo ( "house" ) i (plural ) ssa ( inessive, "in" ) ni ( shows possession by a first person singular of " my " ). ( But the plural is not always infix -i ​​formed with the. Example talo → Talot ( " houses "). )
  • The Hungarian language follows the same principle: ház ( "House ") → Hazam ( " my house ") → házaim ( " my house ") → házaimban ( " in my houses" ). ( Again, the plural is not always infix -i ​​formed with the. Ház See → házak ( "houses" ) → házakban ( " in houses "). )
  • In Turkish, it is also: göz ( " eye") → gözler ( " eyes ") → gözleri ( "eyes", accusative ) → gözlerim ( " my eyes ", nominative ) → gözlerimi ( " My Eyes" directed at something ) → gözlerimin ( " my eyes "; eg gözlerimin rengi → " the color of my eyes ") → gözleriminse ( " if it is part of my eyes " )
  • While most agglutinative languages ​​use suffixes used as Khasi, a Mon-Khmer language, only prefixes and prepositions. Comparisons: nga leit - " I go ," nga la leit - " I went ," nga la lah leit - " I was gone ."
  • The Hattic language, the Sumerian language, Burushaski and the Mayan languages ​​employ prefixes, suffixes, and even infixes.

The difference between agglutinative and fusional languages ​​is often less sharp but rather continuously flowing. Different languages ​​tend in one direction or the other, purely agglutinative or fusional purely are rare.

Sometimes the term " agglutinative languages ​​" is also used as a synonym for synthetic languages ​​, which also inflecting languages ​​and fusional be included, although this is technically incorrect.

The best examples of agglutinating languages ​​are Azeri Basque, Georgian, Tatar, Turkish, Chechen, the Dravidians languages ​​, the Uralic languages ​​( eg Finnish, Estonian, Hungarian ), Guarani, Quechua, Aymara, Inuktitut, Swahili, Malay. Also Esperanto and a number of other planned languages ​​belong to this category. Other examples from the earlier history are also the most languages ​​of the Middle East, as Elamitisch, Hurrian, Urartian, Guti, Lullubi, Kassitisch and Sumerian.

The agglutinative languages ​​are not yet fully grouped according to language families, although, for example, Finnish and Hungarian are related. Rather, this property has developed at a plurality of separate languages ​​by convergent evolution.

Agglutinative languages ​​tend to have a high number of affixes / morphemes per word, and great regularity. For example, the Japanese or the Persian know only two irregular verbs (see irregular Japanese verbs or Persian verbs).

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