Fusional language - Your Art History Reference Guide!

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Fusional language


A fusional language is a type of synthetic language, distinguished from agglutinative languages by its tendency to "squish together" many morphemes in a way which can be difficult to segment.

The canonical examples of fusional languages are Latin and German, with Dutch as a close follow-up. Most European languages are relatively fusional.

A good illustration of fusionality in language is the Latin word amo, "I love". The ending -o denotes indicative mood, active voice, first person, singular, present tense. Changing any of these features requires replacement of the suffix -o with something else.

Last updated: 10-25-2005 21:00:25
Last updated: 01-04-2007 01:18:57
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