Science Fair Project Encyclopedia
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: 10-11-2005 14:09:28
10-26-2009 08:16:03
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The contents of this article is licensed from www.wikipedia.org under the GNU Free Documentation License. Click here to see the transparent copy and copyright details