Agglutination

An agglutinative language in the strict definition will form words by joining together unchangable stems and affixes, where these don't fuse or change form dependent on other affixes. But "agglutinative" is also often used incorrectly as a synonym for the wider category "synthetic", which includes fusional and inflected languages (synthetic languages have a high morpheme-to-word ratio).

There some difficulties with agglutinative languages like Quechua.

Example

For instance:

wasi — house

wasikuna — houses

wasita — to the house

wasikunata — to the houses

wasiy — my house

wasiita — to my house

wasiikuna — my houses

wasiikunata — to my houses

wasinchik — our house

wasinchikta — to our house

wasinchikkunata — to our houses

Or Basque:

etxea la casa

etxe gorria la casa roja

etxe gorri zaharra la casa roja y vieja

etxe gorri zaharrarekin con la casa roja y vieja

etxe gorri zaharrarentzat para la casa roja y vieja

This sort of complex would actually fit quite well into the current Apertium model, although each paradigm would have a great number of possible members due to the large numbers of suffixes (and this is complicated by the fact that suffix order is variable). It could also be handled by form generation, again with the drawback that many thousands of possible forms would need to be generated.

Paradigms can refer to other paradigms, so this kind of thing should work just fine?

Alternatives to lttoolbox

Other systems popular for agglutinative languages:

• HFST
• SFST (see also Omorfi)
• Hunmorph

See also

• Prefixes and infixes