Fusional language

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Linguistic typology
Morphological
Morphosyntactic
Word order

A fusional language (also called inflecting language) is a type of synthetic language, distinguished from agglutinative languages by its tendency to overlay many morphemes to denote grammatical, syntactic or semantic change.

Examples of fusional Indo-European languages are: Sanskrit (and the modern Indo-Aryan languages), Greek (classical and modern), Latin, Latvian, Lithuanian, Russian, German, Icelandic, Polish, Croatian, Serbian, Slovak, Ukrainian, and Czech. Another notable group of fusional languages is the Semitic languages group. A high degree of fusion is also found in many Sami languages, such as Skolt Sami.

An illustration of fusionality is the Latin word bonus ("good"). The ending -us denotes masculine gender, nominative case, and singular number. Changing any one of these features requires replacing the suffix -us with a different one. In the form bonum, the ending -um denotes either masculine accusative singular, neuter accusative singular, or neuter nominative singular.

History

Fusional languages generally tend to lose their inflection over the centuries—some languages much more quickly than others.[1] While Proto-Indo-European was fusional, some of its descendants have shifted to a more analytic structure, such as Modern English and Afrikaans, or agglutinative, such as Persian and Armenian. Other descendants are fusional, including Sanskrit, Latin, Ancient Greek, Lithuanian, and most Slavic languages.

Some languages shift over time from agglutinative to fusional. For example, while most Uralic languages are predominantly agglutinative, Estonian is markedly evolving in the direction of a fusional language. On the other hand, Finnish, its close relative, exhibits fewer fusional traits, thereby keeping closer to the mainstream Uralic type.

Declension

Another typical feature of fusional languages is their systems of declensions.

See also

References

  1. ↑ Deutscher, Guy (2006). The unfolding of language: an evolutionary tour of mankind's greatest invention (reprint ed.). New York: Holt Paperbacks. ISBN 978-0-8050-8012-4. 

This article is issued from Wikipedia. The text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share Alike; additional terms may apply for the media files.