[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

What is an agglutinative language?

Definition

An agglutinative language is a language in which words are made up of a linear sequence of distinct morphemes and each component of meaning is represented by its own morpheme.

What is a morpheme?

Definition
	A morpheme is the smallest meaningful unit in the grammar of a language.

Discussion

Current approaches to morphology conceive of morphemes as rules involving the linguistic context, rather than as isolated pieces of linguistic matter. They acknowledge that

• meaning may be directly linked to suprasegmental phonological units, such as tone or stress.
• the meaning of a morpheme with a given form may vary, depending on its immediate environment.

Source:

Payne, T. 1997a

This is tougher than Math!

[thulldud]

Turkish is agglutinative. One classic example is the provocative question:

Fotograflardakilerdenmisiniz?

This thing contains one independent noun, and all the rest of it is suffixes ( which are what Turkish uses to embody morphemes ), and the whole thing is a complete, understandable sentence:

"Are you one of the people in the photographs?"

And if you think that one is bad, they've got worse. I don't know any Sumerian, but it must be like this.