In my language learning and teaching journey, I have become somewhat of an armchair linguist, not formally educated nor capable, but does that stop me? Of course not. With what I have experienced and looked into, jargon for aspects of language acquisition and linguistic typology often pop up and leave me at spots that don’t make much sense. A while ago I wrote about mora-timed language for this same reason, as it gave me purpose to get it figured out. Today, as I procrastinate on studying for my biochem exam and am no longer as despondent as earlier this semester, I bring you fusional language.
I think many of us have heard the term “agglutination,” whether you know offhand what it means or not. Languages like German get brought up in this context as we hear gargantuan, mish-mosh words that would take a full 60 seconds to leave your mouth from start to finish. The funny thing, though, is that modern German as a whole is not actually agglutinative! First defined in the early 1800’s by Wilhelm von Humboldt through his study of Native American languages (although no clapping for him, his comments on it were extremely eurocentric and not very chill at times), agglutinative languages are ones that combine many different morphemes (smallest unit of language that has meaning) to create a new word, where each part gives a distinct and unique meaning. While agglutinative concepts can be found in many languages, the thing that makes a language distinctly agglutinative is that the practice is primarily and widely used across the language as a whole. It turns out that with German, and English as well, they just make very large compound words, and unlike in English where we put spaces between each one, Germans don’t. Remember, punctuation conventions are not grammatical, just typographical.
Agglutinative languages fall under the umbrella of synthetic AKA inflectional languages (with the other group being analytic/isolating). What I didn’t realize and know now, is that fusional languages are another type that fall under it as well. With agglutination, the expectation is that one morpheme carries one meaning and that the addition doesn’t strongly affect other morpheme pronunciation or spelling. With fusional language, this concept changes such that a morpheme to be affixed will carry multiple aspects of meaning and possibly change other morphemes. Now, what does that look like in practice?
In Spanish, verb endings not only alter the verb itself with high rates of irregularity, but also can tell us things like mood, voice, tense, aspect, person, and singularity/plurality. On the other hand, in Japanese, something like adding “-ta” only denotes past tense. How many people are doing it, for instance? No idea without more context. From this, albeit a bit simple, you can tell Spanish is more fusional while Japanese is more agglutinative. With languages that have cases, there is a clear lean towards being fusional, such as Lithuanian (Baltic) or Polish (Slavic). An example is the Lithuanian word “namų,” which comes from the singular nominative word “namas” for house. The “-ų” ending denotes not only plurality but is in genitive case.
While on the topic, I mentioned analytic/isolating languages being the other umbrella grouping term. According to a university’s linguistics course webpage I found and clearly trust because it looks like it was made in the 90’s, it describes these as “lack affixes and other types of inflectional and derivational morphology.” Different sources I found claim different concepts, with some making it seem as though “analytic” and “isolating” are synonymous, while others seem to lean towards isolating being one morpheme = one word and analytic just suggesting the use of particles, prepositions, and word order in place of inflection. I have a personal hunch that the reason these are often combined is that very few languages would actually qualify as isolating. Igbo, Vietnamese, and maybe Classical Chinese could fall into this group. But in general, Chinese as a whole is a good example of an analytic language. For instance, languages like English typically need to alter a noun to show plurality, but with Chinese the use of classifiers denote this. In English we can change man to men, add numbers if we want or not, but in Chinese the word for man would not change, and instead you could modify it by saying something like “sì gè nánrén” which literally would tell us “ four [unit] man.” I am not deep enough into Chinese language to tell you if there are other ways, but typically the noun never changes and you add a number or demonstrative (these, those, etc.) to express the additional meaning.
To sum it up, we have analytic/isolating languages and synthetic/inflectional languages. The former suggests a more straightforward concept of morphology, where the morpheme to word ratio is often small and there is little to no inflection. The latter includes agglutinative and fusional languages, which either squish together morphemes each with one meaning or alter or add morphemes of multiple meanings. A few examples of languages that are analytic/isolating include Chinese (Sinitic languages), Igbo, and others. Those that are synthetic/inflectional are German, Baltic/Slavic languages, Japanese, etc. It also seems many languages, through the gain and loss of features, do not fall as firmly in one category or another. English, being what it is, has aspects of both and I can’t firmly tell you what it really is, but online it is described as “rather analytic,” so make of it what you will.
Hopefully this was informative in some way, shape, or form. Linguistic typology is a fascinating field, and while I am no means a linguist, I can certainly appreciate how we study our vast forms of communication and expression. If I can, I’d love to find a paper discussing the effects of speaking highly contrasting languages on the values of a place.
Happy reading,
-Beppa
Sources (not including wiki pages in various languages):
–Bucknell Linguistics 105 – Morphological Typology
–Wilhelm von Humboldt and the World of Languages
–Agglutinative Indo-European languages
–FROM CUMULATIVE TO SEPARATIVE EXPONENCE IN INFLECTION: REVERSING THE MORPHOLOGICAL CYCLE