A fusional language (also called inflecting language) is a type of synthetic language, distinguished from agglutinative languages by its tendency to overlay many morphemes in a way that can be difficult to segment.
Examples of fusional Indo-European languages are Sanskrit (and the modern Indo-Aryan languages), Greek (classical and modern), Latin, Lithuanian, Russian, German, Polish, Croatian, Serbian, Slovak and Czech. Another notable group of fusional languages is the Semitic languages group. A high degree of fusion is also found in many Sami languages, such as Skolt Sami.
An illustration of fusionality is the Latin word bonus "good". The ending -us denotes masculine gender, nominative case, and singular number. Changing any one of these features requires replacing the suffix -us with a different one. In the form bonum, the ending -um denotes either masculine accusative singular, neuter accusative singular or neuter nominative singular.
Read more about Fusional Language: History, Declension
Famous quotes containing the word language:
“The hypothesis I wish to advance is that ... the language of morality is in ... grave disorder.... What we possess, if this is true, are the fragments of a conceptual scheme, parts of which now lack those contexts from which their significance derived. We possess indeed simulacra of morality, we continue to use many of the key expressions. But we have—very largely if not entirely—lost our comprehension, both theoretical and practical, of morality.”
—Alasdair Chalmers MacIntyre (b. 1929)