Re: just curious.. ;)

David Peterson wrote:
>     See, in inflectional, there are different endings for each case, whereas
> in agglutinative, there's a non-changing affix for each morpheme, and it's
> never reduced; they just get piled on.  I hope that's a simple (if not
> over-simplified), non-controversial explanation of the difference.  :)
Well, agglutinating languages can have variations in the forms, for
example, vowel harmony, where the vowel changes depending on the vowels
used in the word.  For example, a common form of vowel harmony is one in
which the vowels of the word must be either all front or all back.  So
that, for example, you could have a word "keti" or "kotu" (meaning, say,
"man" and "house") but not *"ketu" (since /e/ is front and /u/ is
back).  Affixes would have two forms, like -to/-tö (meaning, say,
"Genitive"), so the the genitive of _keti_ would be _ketitö_, while the
genitive of _kotu_ would be _kotuto_.  There may also be phonetic
restrictions.  For example, my Uatakassi forbids /sC/ clusters,
simplifying them to /SS/, so that -tas + -ki (ki = /Ci/) (3rd person
singular rational and non-punctual respectively) creating -tassi
(/taSSi/)

Basically, an agglutinating language is one in which you simply string
morphemes together, often subject to certain phonetic adjustments, to
create more complex words.

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