Questions tagged [agglutination]
A morphological derivation process whereby complex words are formed by the stringing together of morphemes.
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In agglutinative languages with long "sentence words", how do they conceptualize of these "words" and their parts?
I asked a similar question on languages with "small words": In languages with "small words", how do they conceptualize of these units?
How do agglutinative languages with long, &...
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Do Turkish sentences have to ever "fall back" to using extra words instead of using suffixes?
I just was thinking about how you might run into problems (in a language like English), where using affixes break down because they are too simplistic (they are used for the common/simple case ...
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When do you go from morpheme to word to sentence in agglutinative languages?
I am working on a cross-language dictionary for fun (i.e. every language), and have been refining this idea of "terms" (as described in that link) for a while. A term is basically anything ...
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How do speakers of languages which can form arbitrary long words deal with long words? [closed]
Looking at this long word list and coming from this conlang question, I am wondering how languages which allow for arbitrarily long words (I don't know for sure, but agglutinative languages, or German,...
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Sound Changes concerning Vowel Harmony
How do sound changes operate in languages that have vowel harmony? Do Do they change with the vowels and thus create myriad words based on the different forms that it can take on based on affixes? I ...
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What should go into a dictionary in heavily agglutinative languages?
I would like to build a clean "dictionary" (or some sort of "base word form" collection) for various languages. I am used to English, or even Chinese, because it is analytic and ...
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Why is Hungarian considered a mostly agglutinative language?
Hungarian is often used as the prototypical example of a heavily agglutinative, synthetic language, and with regards to noun declension and derivational morphology this is doubtless true; Hungarian ...
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Are the hebrew prefix letters (משה וכלב) considered a form of agglutination?
An example of this letters can be seen in the word וכשלהתמרמרויותינו
where the וכש at start mean "and during to" (the entire word means "and during to our grumblings).
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Example of language with lots of agglutination/fusion/inflection without a lot of regularity
Wondering what a good example language is where, when you combine "prefixes" or "suffixes" to a base, it (a) changes the phonetic form of the word in certain places, and (b) this specific pattern only ...
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How agglutinative languages affect comprehension
I am just learning about agglutinative languages so I don't have much experience with them. I am looking at longest words for example words in a language like Finnish, but not sure yet if those would ...
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Do case endings really make sentences shorter?
In the Language Construction Kit, Mark Rosenfelder makes the claim that case endings 'makes things compact and frees up word order'. The latter is pretty obvious, but do case endings really make ...
user19661
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What prevents certain grammatical forms to be analysed as one word?
When analysing a language, when do we analyse certain morphemes as one word as opposed to multiple, or is this arbitrary?
For instance, I could make the claim that (in certain cases) 'a/an' is a ...
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Are fusional languages easier to learn than isolating languages?
As some of you may know, auxlangers tend towards isolating languages. At the very least, the direct object is determined by word order rather than with a case ending (mostly because most West ...
user19661
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Are there right-branching agglutinative languages?
The major agglutinative languages like Turkish and Japanese are also notable for being almost strictly left-branching, much more so than, say, English is right-branching.
Is it a coincidence, or is ...
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Statistic data on average morpheme-to-word ratios
I wonder whether there is any statistic data on morpheme-to-word ratio of certain languages. Is this something that can be and has been measured? The languages I am most interested in are the ...
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Why do PIE verbs have suffixes -m-, -s-, -t-, while personal pronouns have m-, t-, s-?
Usually it is assumed that in PIE the verb forms for the singular first, second, and third person are respectively -m-, -s-, -t- (cfr. Latin).
The personal pronouns, instead, have the second and ...
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Across agglutinative languages are there tendencies for morphemes to occur in certain orders?
In agglutinative languages there are normally roots for nouns and/or verbs that can have multiple morphemes attached as affixes, following certain rules, to add information such as tense, aspect, mood,...
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Does the classification of languages "agglutinating" concern itself with inflectional morphology, derivational morphology, or both?
I had always thought that the terms "agglutinative" and "agglutination" referred to the typology of the inflection in a language.
But on another question here there seem to be a number of comments ...
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Have agglutinative languages productive morphology?
In non-agglutinative languages we have certain word classes that would be considered productive, and we have word classes that wouldn't. Morphological inflection, on the other hand, is from my ...
user1750
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Does the term "(highly) agglutinating language" refer to inflectional endings, word-formation processes, or both?
I had always thought agglutinative languages were inflected languages where the inflections to a greater degree are built up by multiple affixes, each having an atomic effect. (Unlike the -s on ...
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Which prefixing language has the most speakers?
Most if not all national or widely spoken languages with an inflecting or agglutinating typology do all of their inflecting at the end of the word. These are called "suffixing languages".
This is ...
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Is there any agglutinative Indo-European language?
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 ...
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Word frequency list for agglutinative languages like Swahili?
I'm an intermediate Swahili speaker looking to substantially increase the size of my vocabulary over the next couple weeks. However, I want to optimize my learning curve by focusing on the first 2000 ...
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What is the maximum number of forms a (modern) Japanese verb can take?
Recently I've begun to wonder how many possible forms can be made from a single Japanese verb.
I asked a similar question first on the Japanese Language & Usage site, where I received some ...
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Are there agglutinative languages without a propensity for long compound nouns?
I've noticed a propensity for agglutinating languages to also permit quite long compound nouns. Finnish, Turkish and Hungarian certainly have them and I've been finding a few now that I'm trying to ...
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Agglutination in Proto-Indo-European
Based on numerous sources, it seems clear that Proto-Indo-European was
Productively agglutinative with non-root morphemes (and perhaps some specific roots that are also able to act like bound ...
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Is there really a difference between agglutinative and non-agglutinative languages when spoken?
What's the difference between agglutinative and non-agglutinative languages when spoken? According to my understanding, agglutinative languages typically join prefixes and suffixes extensively.
For ...
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What are some examples of well-known agglutinatve languages moving toward inflecting morphology?
We've had questions about inflected languages moving towards analytic morphology and about isolating languages moving to agglutinating morphology but we haven't yet investigated the third case.
In ...
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Are there any papers etc analyzing Japanese as a language with noun cases rather than particles?
Japanese is often included in lists of agglutinating languages.
Many (most?) agglutinating languages are analysed as having case systems.
Of course cases and prepositions/postpositions fill the same ...
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