Agglutination

Both the current Apertium system and the suggested plugin system face another set of 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.

See also

Prefixes and infixes