Fusional language

A fusional language structure in language typology by Wilhelm von Humboldt and August Wilhelm Schlegel, a subspecies of the synthetic speech construction. In a so-called fusional language is the grammatical function of a word by attaching affixes, the affixation, indicated.

Good examples of fusional languages ​​are Latin and German. Most Indo-European languages ​​have fusional elements.

The difference to the agglutinative languages ​​is that here an affix expresses the value of several grammatical rules, whereas in an agglutinative language any grammatical category is represented by a single affix. The fusional languages ​​use fewer affixes and affixes which express not only one but several grammatical categories. More information can be fused into a single affix.

Using a Latin word like " Clamat " ( he / she / it calls ) can illustrate the functionality of a fusional language. " Clamat " can be decomposed into the morpheme " clama " and the affix " - t". The latter contains information on the grammatical categories person, number, gender Verbi, in this case " 3 Person singular ( present indicative ) active. " The change in one of these categories requires a complete change the affix.