These categories, however, are tendencies rather than absolutes. Agglutination is the compounding of morphemes to a root to form words. Agglutinative languages treat what we consider separate words or even different parts of speech as part of a complex word. Taking into account environmental rules such as sandhi , vowel harmony, etc., agglutinative endings will remain the same for all words. Unlike the majority of compund words in English, agglutination creates words with predictable meanings rather than creating synergetic metaphors.
Inflection is the addition of a morpheme to a root or word in order to change meaning or nuance.
Although English is not generally considered an inflected language because it has a much simpler use of morphology than most languages, it uses inflections in strong verbs such as I spoke and to distinguish pronoun cases . Unlike agglutination, inflexion does not change the syntactic category of the word, although it may change the part of speech. Inflective endings normally cannot be readily broken down into individual morphemes. Inflective endings often have variants that form arbitrary classes within syntactic categories. In highly inflected languages, syntax is of lesser importance and word order can be very flexible.