aglutinare

Aglutinare is a term derived from the Latin word "agglutinare," meaning to glue or stick together. In a linguistic context, it refers to a process where morphemes, the smallest meaningful units of language, are joined together to form a word. This joining typically occurs without significant changes to the form of the individual morphemes. Aglutinative languages are characterized by a high degree of agglutination, meaning that words can be formed by stringing together many morphemes in a predictable sequence.

Each morpheme in an agglutinative language generally carries a single grammatical meaning, such as tense, number, case, or person. This contrasts with fusional languages, where a single morpheme may express multiple grammatical functions simultaneously. For example, in Turkish, a well-known agglutinative language, the word "evlerimde" can be broken down as follows: "ev" (house), "-ler" (plural), "-im" (my), and "-de" (in/at). Each suffix clearly denotes its specific meaning.

Other examples of agglutinative languages include Finnish, Hungarian, and Japanese. The systematic and transparent nature of morpheme combination in agglutination makes it a subject of interest in linguistic typology and morphology studies. The clarity of the boundaries between morphemes allows for a more direct analysis of word structure and grammatical relationships.