[Haskell-cafe] Re: OT: Languages

[Tillmann Rendel]

wren ng thornton wrote:
> Indeed. The proliferation of compound words is noteworthy, but it's not 
> generally considered an agglutinative language. From what (very little) 
> German I know compounds tend to be restricted to nouns, as opposed to 
> languages like Turkish, Japanese, Korean,...

Yes, compounds are restricted to nouns in German. But as I understand 
it, agglutinative relates more to the inflection system than to the 
lexicon anyway.

In German, inflection is usually done by adding a single suffix to the 
stem, and possibly altering the stem. The single suffix encodes various 
informations (e.g. number, gender and case for nouns) in a single morpheme.

In an agglutinative language, inflection is done by adding one morpheme 
per information.

   Tillmann