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Agglutinative languages

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Chung
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 Message 25 of 27
22 April 2015 at 6:34pm | IP Logged 
This paper by the linguists Barış Kabak and Frans Plank has examples of alternations in Korean and Turkish that remind one of fusional languages despite their often being labelled agglutinative.

Iversen wrote:
Expugnator wrote:

Georgian has polypersonal verbs, but it helped to think of them as the direct/indirect object attachments in Spanish and Portuguese (the latter even has mesoclisis):

დამირეკე! Llámame!



Excellent observation, which when applied in practice serves to remove much of the scariness of the concept of agglutination.

I would just add that the extensive use of invariable pre-, in- and suffixes in for instance Latin and Russian also is a kind of agglutination, but the inescapable focus on the difficult variable and multipurpose endings has been given priority when it came to linguistic namedropping.


The typologist Martin Hapselmath expresses somewhat similarly to Iversen in this paper when he states in the abstract:

In Haspelmath, Martin (2009) “An Empirical Test of the Agglutination Hypothesis” In: Scalise, Sergio & Magni, Elisabetta & Bisetto, Antonietta (eds.) Universals of language today. (Studies in Natural Language and Linguistic Theory, 76.) Dordrecht: Springer, 13-29., Martin Haspelmath wrote:
...the current evidence suggests that "agglutination" is just one way of trying to capture the strangeness of non-Indo-European languages, which all look alike to Eurocentric eyes.


...and in the conclusion:

In Haspelmath, Martin (2009) “An Empirical Test of the Agglutination Hypothesis” In: Scalise, Sergio & Magni, Elisabetta & Bisetto, Antonietta (eds.) Universals of language today. (Studies in Natural Language and Linguistic Theory, 76.) Dordrecht: Springer, 13-29., Martin Haspelmath wrote:
While Turkish could perhaps still be characterized as "agglutinating" and Latin as "fusional", for many languages neither of these terms would apply, and it would not be possible to say that they are "intermediate" between these two extremes either. It is quite possible that the reason for the success of the agglutination/fusion distinction is that Latin and Turkish have been such prominent languages in Western linguistics over the last few hundred years. They differ strikingly in their morphological systems (cf. Plank 1991), and it's perhaps natural that from this point of view one would classify languages as more Latin-like or more Turkish-like. However, linguistics should move beyond Latinocentrism and Turkocentrism and try to do justice to each language, to describe and characterize it in its own terms, or in truly universal terms.

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stelingo
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 Message 26 of 27
23 April 2015 at 12:41am | IP Logged 
Interesting post, Chung,as ever. Being new to Turkish, can I just clarify
that name in the nom is ad, not at? I believe at means horse.
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Chung
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 Message 27 of 27
23 April 2015 at 1:11am | IP Logged 
You are correct. I gotta be more careful.

The alternation definitely occurs here in Turkmen and Tuvan with at and respectively.

For clarity, unspecified Turkic at can be:

Azeri, Turkish: at "horse"
Turkmen: at "horse"; "name" (cf. Kazakh, Kyrgyz)

Unspecified Turkic ad can be:

Azeri: ad "name"; "noun"
Turkish: ad "name"

Unspecified Turkic ат can be

Bashkir: ат "horse"
Kazakh, Kyrgyz: ат "horse"; "name" (cf. Turkmen)
Tatar ат "name" (cf. ат: кыргый ат "wild horse")
Tuvan ат "name" (cf. аът "gelding")
Uigur: ат "horse" (more often ئات in the modified Arabic script used by most Uigurs)



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