Infixión

Infixión is a term used in linguistics to describe the insertion of a morpheme (a meaningful unit of language) within another morpheme, typically a root word. This process results in a word where the inserted element is enclosed by parts of the original word. While not common in English, infixion is a significant grammatical feature in many other languages.

For example, in Tagalog, a language spoken in the Philippines, infixion is used to form different grammatical tenses or aspects. If the root word is *sulat* meaning "write," inserting the infix *-um-* can create *sumulat*, meaning "wrote." The infix is placed between the first consonant and the first vowel of the root.

Other languages that exhibit infixion include some Native American languages, like Dakota, and Arabic. In Arabic, infixes are often used to derive different verb forms from a basic root. The placement and form of the infix can vary greatly between languages, and the resulting meaning can range from tense and aspect to plurality or even a change in the word's core meaning.

The study of infixion is important for understanding the morphological diversity of human languages and how grammatical information can be encoded within words. It highlights that word formation is not always a linear process of adding prefixes or suffixes to a root.