Talk:Agglutinative language

message: Shouldn't this be agglutinative language?  --Chuck Smith
-- Probably yes. 'Agglutinative language' language gives 800 hits in Google, while 'agglutinating language' only gives 200 hits. --HJH
Len I didn't miss that; but Wikipedia is not authoritative, I took the time to read the other hits Mintguy
:Take the time to minor in Linguistics and learn about the various types of polysynthetic languages, like me. The error you are seeing on the web is the near-ubiquitous one of mistaking "agglutinative" for a synonym of "(poly)synthetic". It is not. (you might find the article on fusional language, skeletal as it is, rather instructive.) --User:LenBudney
I see that German is given as an example of an Agglutinative_language and also as an example of a fusional language.  Which one is it? The text implies that if it's one then it can't be the other.  Or can it?  --Zoicon5
:I see that each type also claims Esperanto as an example. -- Zoicon5
I've moved German and Esperanto to the back, saying 'and to a lesser extent'. More seriously, I've changed 'polysynthetic' to 'synthetic'. The term 'polysynthetic' refers to languages like those in North America that incorporate both the noun and verb into a single phonological word. The term 'agglutinative' covers two things: (a) multiple morphemes in the same word, and that's in core inflection of nouns and verbs (so a few English examples like kind+ness+es don't count); and (b) each morpheme phonetically separate, as opposed to other synthetic types. In fact, the core morphology of German is fusional: -es is gen.+sg.+m/n., so it really shouldn't be in the list. Gritchka 17:43 25 Jul 2003 (UTC)~
:I would like to agree with you (Gritchka) about the idea that 'polysynthetic' => noun incorporation.  However, several months ago I had a conversation about this on a mailing list, and at least etymologically (going back to Sapir, I think) 'polysynthetic' simply means "extremely agglutinative" or "containing in a single word what would be complete sentences in other languages."  Of course the latter is vague (you can arguably do this in a pro-drop fusional language), but the general idea is that there are a whole lot of morphemes in a single word.  And this seems to be a (not necessarily the only) widespread idea of what 'polysynthetic' means.  (I've actually never heard the term 'synthetic' used this way, but maybe I have just overlooked it.)
:Mcswell 22:55, 22 March 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Article title

message: At the bottom of the page, there is the statement:
"Agglutinative languages tend to have a high rate of affixes/morphemes per word, and to be very regular. For example, Japanese has only two irregular verbs, and Turkish has only one."
I believe that there are three irregular Japanese verbs:
"suru" (to do) has the stem form "shi" -- if it was regular, it would be "su" or "suri"
"kuru" (to come) has the stem form "ki" -- if it was regular, it would be "ku" or "kuri"
"iku" (to go) has the gerund form "itte" -- if it was regular, it would be "iite"
I suspect that the two noted verbs in the article are "kuru" and "suru". Is there any reason that "iku" was left out?
-Seth
:Some analyses of Japanese grammar don't consider "suru" to be a true verb but rather an "auxiliary". So maybe that writer was only considering "kuru" and "iku" — Hippietrail 22:59, 29 May 2004 (UTC)
replies: text: Suru is an independent verb, not only an auxiliary. In the sentence "Nani o shimashou ka?" ("What shall we do?"), it is plainly not an auxiliary, as there is no other verb. It's much more likely that the verbs the author had in mind are "kuru" and "suru", because these are the only two verbs that are not classified as ichidan or godan verbs in traditional Japanese grammar. Iku is definitely irregular, though, as is "aru" (its negative is "nai", rather than the expected "aranai"), and there are other irregular verbs once you consider honorific speech (e.g., the imperative of "kudasaru" is "kudasai", the masu form of "gozaru" is "gozaimasu" and not "gozarimasu", etc.). - furrykef (Talk at me) 10:28, 4 September 2009 (UTC)

text: I concur that some consideration should be given for what to do with the Japanese ending copula da / desu.  However, I would not go so far as to include compound verbs formed by nouns + irregulars.  On the one hand, the list gets ridiculously long pretty quickly, and on the other, they are after all compounds.  Though 勉強する benkyō suru translates roughly as "study" or "to study" in English, the basic morphemes in Japanese are quite separate and distinct -- benkyō, and suru.  One may as well advocate lumping together similar constructs in English as single verbs -- but then "dothelaundry" doesn't seem to work very well.  :)   ---  Eirikr 05:42, 6 Apr 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Number of Japanese irregular verbs 

message: It says there is only one. i'm a native turkish speaker but i haven't heard of it yet. could somebody tell me?
:I just had a quick look with Google and found this site which lists at least 14 irregular verbs in Turkish! This seems to be restricted to the aorist. Here is another site which goes into more detail about to be, which is probably what the writer on this article had in mind. — Hippietrail 07:14, 6 Oct 2004 (UTC)
replies: text: I don't know about "to be" in Turkish, but it's quite possible that some people analyse it as a verb and others as a copula which they see as not a verb though usually with many similarities. — Hippietrail 02:08, 30 November 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: If the verb in question is "one of a kind", it's a copula, and is morphosyntactically different from the others in some way, then maybe it should not be called an irregular verb. You don't call a vast plain with a single tall mountain "an irregular surface". :) --Pablo D. Flores (Talk) 22:37, 16 December 2005 (UTC)
replies: text:  Irregularity happens when a non-Turkic word came into usage.  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 139.179.207.204 (talk) 00:41, 23 March 2009 (UTC)
replies: text:  Turkish has native irregular verbs (and nouns for that matter): For example the aorist tense (geniş zaman) suffix -r requires an epenthetic vowel after verb stems with a final consonant. It's open (-e- or -a- depending on the vowel harmony) for monosyllabic verbs (dal-a-r) and close (-ı-,-i-,-u- or -ü-, again with vowel harmony) for polysyllabic verbs (otur-u-r). But about twenty monosyllabic verbs get close vowels (gel-i-r). It's clearly an irregularity. Also some verbs go through lenition of the last consonant, but most don't (bit-ecek, but gid-ecek, not *git-ecek). Causative form construction is also very irregular (al -> al-dır-, iç -> iç-ir, git -> götür) but it's a borderline case between inflection and derivation so I'll stop here. So I vote for changing the article as Turkish having "only a handful of irregular verbs".Cyco130 (talk) 18:03, 8 October 2013 (UTC)
thread_title:  Irregular verbs in Turkish 

message: What is the reference for there being only a few irregular verbs in Nahuatl?  I can't find anything on the 'Nahuatl' wiki page.  Also at issue is which Nahuatl.  Presumably this refers to classical Nahuatl, i.e. the form attested in various written manuscripts from the early post-conquest era.  I'm working with another researcher on building a morphological transducer for several varieties of modern-day Nahuatl, and I can attest to the fact that these varieties are *full* of irregularity.  (Of course some of the irregularity is predictable on a phonological basis, if you allow your phonological rules access to lexical features; but to me, needing to refer to lexical features in the phonology is synonomous with "irregular".)
Mcswell 14:31, 22 March 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Irregular verbs in Nahuatl 

message: Some Hungarian verb endings have even 3 meanings.
-k: first person / singular / indefinite
-m: first person / singular / definite
--88.112.229.248 15:35, 10 May 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Hungarian conjugation 

message: The article currently states, "Agglutinative is sometimes used as a synonym for synthetic, although it technically is not. When used in this way, the word embraces fusional languages and inflected languages in general." However, the first sentence of the fusional language article basically says that "fusional language" and "inflected language" are synonyms (also, Inflected language currently redirects to Fusional language). 
If these terms are really synonyms, then this article shouldn't talk about them as if there's a distinction; if the terms refer to different things, then Fusional language should be fixed to reflect this. I'm not a linguist, so I'll leave the task to someone who knows.
Gzabers (talk) 17:41, 27 August 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  Fusional/inflected distinction 

message: Persian is not an agglutinative language it is Iranic language with Indo-Earopean branch how it can be a Agglutinative language?  —Preceding unsigned comment added by Snake co1 (talk • contribs) 20:40, 23 August 2010 (UTC)
replies: text: Your statement is a nonsequitor. There are agglutinative langauges in many language families and it is certainly possible for a family to have both agglutinative and non-agglutinative languages in it. If there is an argument for or against Persian being agglutinative then this is the wrong argument. — Hippietrail (talk) 14:03, 3 July 2011 (UTC)
replies: text:  Persian is indeed agglutinative, not as much as Turkish or other "pure" examples, but there is a lot of agglutination "going on"...  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 77.169.49.216 (talk) 21:14, 12 March 2015 (UTC)
thread_title:  Persian is an agglutinative language !  

message: * In the Wikipedia Altaic languages article:
"Altaic /ælˈteɪɨk/ is a proposed language family of central Eurasia."
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altaic_languages
Recently, Altaic languages was removed from the Agglutinative language article because the editor (Jijwatmaat) felt that it is "Not an actual language family".
Is it not possible to list Altaic languages with the (editorial?) NOTE from the relevant article that that 
"Altaic is a proposed language family of central Eurasia." ??
MaynardClark (talk) 21:05, 7 November 2014 (UTC)
thread_title: [[Agglutinative language]]s list

message: The article lists "Japonic languages" as well as "Japanese". Isn't it odd?  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 130.216.30.126 (talk) 01:55, 20 October 2011 (UTC)
thread_title:  List of examples 

message: This is highly misleading, especially as an example of "agglutinative languages having regular inflection!"
Not sure why this sentence is in the introduction.  Maybe some readers would imagine Korean verbs being highly regular, with only ten irregular forms you have to remember.
Any native Korean speaker can tell you that this is *definitely* not the case.  What it means is that Korean has (maybe) ten different *classes* of irregular verbs: many classes have hundreds (or maybe thousands) of verbs each, and you just have to memorize whether a verb is "regular" or "ㄷ-irregular" or so on.
(It is somewhat helped by the fact that each irregular form can only appear with a particular sound, so given the dictionary form, there are at most two or three ways it can inflect, or so I think.)
And then there are hundreds of verb suffixes, which can combine in a messy way, sometimes with optional (or mandatory) contractions.
In short, Korean verbs are definitely *NOT* an example of a grammar with regular inflection.
24.5.249.55 (talk) 05:42, 21 October 2016 (UTC)
thread_title:  "Korean has only ten irregular forms of conjugation." - Wait 

message: Is not an agglutinative language, but f.e. Batak is. Maarten van Thiel  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 81.206.47.172 (talk) 18:54, 26 September 2020 (UTC)
thread_title:  Indonesian 

message: — Assignment last updated by Fedfed2 (talk) 00:54, 9 December 2023 (UTC)
thread_title: Wiki Education assignment: Linguistics in the Digital Age

message: this is a general encylopedia but the inro is written for a PhD. To use technical langauge the intro sucks.
honestly people  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 50.245.17.105 (talk) 13:32, 9 April 2024 (UTC)
thread_title:  what a bad intro