Fusional language

Fusional languages or inflected languages are a type of

For example, the Spanish verb comer ("to eat") has the first-person singular preterite tense form comí ("I ate"); the single suffix -í represents both the features of first-person singular agreement and preterite tense, instead of having a separate affix for each feature.

Another illustration of fusionality is the

Many Indo-European languages feature fusional morphology, including:

• Balto-Slavic languages, e.g. Polish, Russian, Ukrainian, and the South Slavic languages (with the exception of Bulgarian and Macedonian, which are partially analytic)
• Pashto, Persian, Kashmiri, Urdu, Punjabi
• Latin and the Romance languages, e.g. Italian, French, Spanish, Portuguese, and Romanian
• Celtic languages, e.g. Irish and Welsh
• Some Germanic languages, e.g. German, Faroese, and Icelandic
• Greek (Classical and Modern) and Albanian

Semitic languages

Another notable group of fusional languages is the

Caucasian languages

Northeast Caucasian languages are weakly fusional.

Uralic languages

A limited degree of fusion is also found in many

Unusual for a Native North American language, Navajo is sometimes described as fusional because of its complex and inseparable verb morphology.^[1][2]

Some Amazonian languages such as Ayoreo have fusional morphology.^[3]

The Fuegian language Selk'nam has fusional elements. For example, both evidentiality and gender agreement are coded with a single suffix on the verb:^[4]

Africa

Some

For example, most Uralic languages are predominantly agglutinative, but Estonian is markedly evolving in the direction of a fusional language. On the other hand, Finnish, its close relative, exhibits fewer fusional traits and thereby has stayed closer to the mainstream Uralic type. However, Sámi languages, while also part of the Uralic family, have gained more fusionality than Finnish and Estonian since they involve consonant gradation but also vowel apophony.

Fusional inflections

Inflections in fusional languages tend to fall in two patterns, based on which part of speech they modify: declensions for nouns and adjectives, and conjugations for verbs.

Declension

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One feature of many fusional languages is their systems of

Within a fusional language, there are usually more than one declension; Latin and Greek have five, and the Slavic languages have anywhere between three and seven. German has multiple declensions based on the vowel or consonant ending the word, though they tend to be more unpredictable.

However, many descendants of fusional languages tend to lose their case marking. In most Romance and Germanic languages, including Modern English (with the notable exceptions of German, Icelandic and Faroese), encoding for case is merely vestigial because it no longer encompasses nouns and adjectives but only pronouns.

Compare the

Conjugation

For example, in French, the verbal suffix depends on the mood, tense and aspect of the verb, as well as on the person and number (but not the gender) of its subject. That gives rise to typically 45 different single-word forms of the verb, each of which conveys some or all of the following:

• mood (
  indicative, subjunctive, conditional or imperative
  )
• tense (past, present or future)
• aspect (perfective or imperfective)
• person (first, second or third), and
• number (singular or plural).

Changing any one of those pieces of information without changing the others requires the use of a different suffix, the key characteristic of fusionality.

English has two examples of conjugational fusion. The verbal suffix -s indicates a combination of present tense with both third-person and singularity of the associated subject, and the verbal suffix -ed used in a verb with no auxiliary verb conveys both

See also

• Inflection
• Synthetic language

References