Fascinating excerpt from a Wikipedia blurb:
"Three features that, together, distinguish Turkish from many other languages are the following:
"1. Turkish is highly agglutinative: its words are able to carry many suffixes (or 'endings').
"2. Turkish exhibits vowel harmony: when a suffix is attached to a stem, the vowel in the suffix is adjusted to harmonize with the last vowel in the stem.
"3. Turkish has no gender."
Posted by nickles at May 11, 2006 11:30 AM | TrackBackI think that highly agglutinative languages, like Turkish, are not necessarily extremely difficult to learn, but aggluntinative characteristics are rather tedious things to deal with if one's native tongue is not filled with similar devices.
Posted by: Carrie at May 11, 2006 11:50 AMHear, hear! You even used the word twice, bravo!
I really, really like Turkish. It's a shame I've had to keep working on my French, since it has delayed digging into the Turkish side of life. Not long now...
Posted by: bob at May 11, 2006 11:54 AMRelated words (I'm building a whole new vocabulary!):
enclitic
constructive suffix
inflexional suffix
t-v distinction
neologisms
Hem, ahem, hem, hem:
Posted by: Krista at May 13, 2006 10:58 PMA cornstarch slurry in a stew is very agglutinative, but caution should be used not to make it too thick, as a gloppy stew is not very palatable.
Posted by: Krista at May 13, 2006 10:59 PMWhen making a fruit salad with its combinations of fruit flavors that may or may not complement each other, vanilla may be a good ingredient to add to agglutinate the flavors just enough to make the fruit salad sing.
Posted by: Krista at May 13, 2006 11:00 PMWhen I was little, I agglutinated my pinky to my father's workbench with superglue. My finger was like a suffix at the end of the long wooden workspace.
Posted by: bob at May 19, 2006 12:48 PMAnd that's why kids should not be allowed to play with glue.
or words.
Posted by: ~funke~ at May 20, 2006 01:54 AMThe glue was playing with ME!
Posted by: bob at May 23, 2006 11:43 AMa likely story.
Posted by: sarah j. at May 24, 2006 11:06 AM