Ani Uveyti Naavod Et H"
Not on mortals do I rely, nor upon angels do I depend, but on the God of the Universe, the God of truth, whose Torah is truth, and who abounds in deeds of goodness and truth. In God do I put my trust; unto God’s holy, precious being do I utter praise. Open my heart to Your Torah. Answer my prayers and the prayers of all Your people Israel for goodness, for life, and for peace. Amen. - Zohar, Parashat Vayakhel

Sunday, May 30, 2010

Agglutinative

I was asking Sam (Who I call Strong in Faith) about the Tallit blessing. He mentioned that the 'NU' means 'US'. Later at another Oneg he said that V' can mean 'And' and that b' can mean "in". I also had known though he reminded me that "IM" means plura

This is key but mysterious. A friend of mine who has studied ancient languages told me the term: Agglutinative.

Here is the definition from wikipedia::

An agglutinative language is a language that uses agglutination extensively: most words are formed by joining morphemes together. This term was introduced by Wilhelm von Humboldt in 1836 to classify languages from a morphological point of view.[1] It was derived from the Latin verb agglutinare, which means "to glue together."[2]

An agglutinative language is a form of synthetic language where each affix typically represents one unit of meaning (such as "diminutive," "past tense," "plural," etc.), and bound morphemes are expressed by affixes (and not by internal changes of the root of the word, or changes in stress or tone). Additionally, and most importantly, in an agglutinative language affixes do not become fused with others, and do not change form conditioned by others.

Synthetic languages that are not agglutinative are called fusional languages; they sometimes combine affixes by "squeezing" them together, often changing them drastically in the process, and joining several meanings in one affix (for example, in the Spanish word comí [I ate], the suffix -í carries the meanings of indicative mood, active voice, past tense, first person singular subject and perfective aspect).

Agglutinative is sometimes used as a synonym for synthetic, although it technically is not. When used in this way, the word embraces fusional languages and inflected languages in general.

The distinction between an agglutinative and a fusional language is often not sharp. Rather, one should think of these as two ends of a continuum, with various languages falling more toward one end or the other. For example, Japanese is generally agglutinative, but expresses fusion in otōto (弟, younger brother?), from oto+hito (originally oto+pito). In fact, a synthetic language may present agglutinative features in its open lexicon but not in its case system: for example, German, Dutch.

Agglutinative languages tend to have a high rate of affixes/morphemes per word, and to be very regular[citation needed]. For example, Japanese has only two irregular verbs (and not very irregular), Luganda has only one (or two, depending on how 'irregular' is defined), Turkish has only one and in Quechua all the verbs are regular. Georgian is an exception; not only is it highly agglutinative (there can be simultaneously up to 8 morphemes per word), but there is also a significant number of irregular verbs, varying in degrees of irregularity.

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