Is there any agglutinative Indo-European language?

Question

It seems like Indo-European languages are always stuck between throwing away complicated fusional grammar (like English) or retaining most of it (like Russian). Are there any Indo-European languages that reanalyzed the verb system into agglutination with series of suffixes rather than trying to stuff complex tense, aspect, and person information into a single arbitrarily chosen suffix?

Or is it generally a rule that languages evolve away from agglutination and never towards it? It seems, for example, that Modern Japanese is a bit more fusional rather than agglutinative due to certain sound changes - for example in Classical Japanese "ikitari" went simplifying into "ikita" (which prevented further addition of affixes since -ta is not a verb citation form ending) and then fused into "itta", which obscures the root "ik", thus becoming somewhat fusional.

Answer 1

Among ancient languages, there are certain traits of aggluttination in Hittite (especially in its verbs of mi-class).

If you are interested in living languages, then one of the possible suggestions would be verbs of the regular -ar or -er types in modern Swedish. The -ar- type is a type of verbs of regular declention taking, like the rest of regular Swedish verbs, a similar ending (here, -ar) for all and any personal forms in Present.

Consider e.g. the verb att svara (to answer):

     Sg.                          Pl.

1.  jag svarar                        vi svarar

2.  du svarar                         ni svarar

3.  hen svarar                        de [dom] svarar

NB: hen is a new coinage, presumably a calque from the Finnish hän. Both new Swedish and the Finnish words mean the same: (s)he. The actual and more exact gender-specific pronouns in Swedish are hon for 'she' and han for 'he'.

Now let's make a Past Tense form:

   Sg.                          Pl.

1.  jag svarade                 vi svarade

2.  du svarade                  ni svarade

3.  hen svarade                 de [dom] svarade

Finally, the Passive Form would be

svaras (it is answered = ´svara+ s ') and svarades (it was answered/answering = 'svara+*de*+s').

But there is more of agglunativity in Swedish nouns, though:-)

Consider e.g. the word eld (fire).

The plural form is eld+ar (yes, unlike -or, the -er and -ar endings are applicable for nouns and verbs, although the adjectives have a different plural - or, actually, emphasised - form).

The postpositional definite article is -na; hence, 'the fires' will be

eld+ar+na => eldarna

UPD: the -na here conveys the meaning of both plurality and definitiveness, and can be divided into -n- (postpositive plural definite marker) + a (emphasised form of a noun applicable in plural only).

So, this form of word can be further structured as eld+ar+n+a => eldarna

Morover, there is a common Germanic survival of the Genitive case, which is - suprisingly! - s.

Hence, 'of [the] fires' (like in 'light of [the] fires') will be

[[eld+ar+n+a+s] ljus] => eldarnas ljus

Answer 2

The Lydian language was distinct from all other Indo-European languages for its agglutinative features. I don't know all the details, but there was an extensive usage of infixes. Generally, all Indo-European Anatolian languages had some kind of agglutinative qualities, apparently because of the substratum languages that were agglutinative e.g. Hattic and Hurrian. Nevetheless, that does not qualify them as agglutinative in the same sense as Korean, Japanese, Turkish, Basque, Berber and so on. On the other hand Tocharian languages changed their IE infectional structure into the agglutinative morphosyntactic type with multi-morphemic endings and suffixes e.g. Toch. B cämp-am-ñe-tstse 'to have the ability'.

As a conclusion, there are very few IE-languages that can be counted as having agglutinative features. As a native Swedish speaker I do not consider myself speaking a language with agglutinative qualities in the same extend as when I compare to Lydian, Tocharian or languages from the Uralic, Caucasian and Altaic language families.

Answer 3

As mentioned, modern Scandinavian (Swedish, Danish, Norwegian) seems like a fairly straightforward example of agglutinative IE languages: the only major exceptions to the agglutination in these languages (that I can think of) are the verbs whose past tense is formed with ablaut rather than suffixes.

Armenian (or at least Western Armenian -- I haven't studied Eastern) doesn't seem especially agglutinative in its noun or verb system. Although its nouns do not have gender classes and the plural ending -(n)er is used for almost all nouns (I don't recall any exceptions at the moment), many words have irregular case endings. Its verb system has three main conjugation classes, the personal endings are not the same in the past and present tense, and there are many different patterns in the formation of past-tense stems.

Answer 4

Persian is classified as an agglutinative language. Also, it seems more likely that rather than simply evolving away from inflection to analytic properties, this only occurs when languages come into contact. Take English, for example. Old English had five cases (if I recall correctly) and lost all but the genitive after hundreds of years of contact with French. Likewise, Mandarin Chinese, being a widely spoken language, would have had to be learned by millions of new speakers who, in practise, would not all have used the language correctly. This is why major languages tend toward analytic properties - inflection is used to a minimum by new speakers. In contrast, isolated groups tend toward languages which have a higher morpheme-word ratio. Australian Aboriginal languages are mostly agglunating; these are used only in small groups of people over large areas, meaning there are few second-language speakers. North American languages are another example, as are the Uralic languages, and even Proto-Indo-European, which was theoretically spoken only in a comparatively small region of the Caucasus. Languages can become more inflected through the process of grammaticalisation. A hypothetical example of this would be if English speakers began using prepositions as prefixes, and after many generations these prefixes lost all meaning as independent morphemes, simply becoming locative cases. Therefore, languages (when isolated from contact with other tongues) could in theory tend toward inflection rather than using analytic structures to convey meaning. If I'm incorrect about any of this, correct me. Hope this helped.