AGGLUTINATIVE • FREE TRANSLATOR.ORG • Definition of Agglutinative

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adjective

Agglutinative adj.

Pertaining to agglutination; tending to unite, or having power to cause adhesion; adhesive.

Synonyms: polysynthetic, holophrastic.

(Philol.) Formed or characterized by agglutination, as a language or a compound. "In agglutinative languages the union of words may be compared to mechanical compounds, in inflective languages to chemical compounds." "Cf. man-kind, heir-loom, war-like, which are agglutinative compounds. The Finnish, Hungarian, Turkish, the Tamul, etc., are agglutinative languages." "Agglutinative languages preserve the consciousness of their roots."

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Etymology of 'Agglutinative'

Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48

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"Agglutinative" Quotes from Famous Books

... of monosyllables pieced into words in the stiffest, most unwieldy manner, stuck together, as it were, with nothing to join them, wherefore this kind of language has been called agglutinative. Chinese belongs to the former class of languages, the "monosyllabic," Turkish to the latter, the "agglutinative." Further, the Turanians were probably the first to invent writing, but never went in that art beyond having one particular sign for every single word—(such is Chinese writing with its forty thousand ...

— Chaldea - From the Earliest Times to the Rise of Assyria • Znade A. Ragozin

... however, alike owed their origin to a race which we will term Sumerian. Its members spoke agglutinative dialects, and the primitive civilization of Babylonia was their creation. They were the founders of its great cities and temples, the inventors of the pictorial system of writing out of which the ...

— Babylonians and Assyrians, Life and Customs • Rev. A. H. Sayce

... aboriginal western European population, dispossessed by the intrusive Indo-European tribes. It stands entirely alone, no kindred having yet been found for it in any part of the world. It is of an exaggeratedly agglutinative type, incorporating into its verb a variety of relations which are almost everywhere else expressed by an independent word."—"The Basque forms a suitable stepping-stone from which to enter the peculiar linguistic ...

— The Iroquois Book of Rites • Horatio Hale

... produced; while the Semites and Akkadians, adopting a Toltec ground-work, modified it in their respective ways, and so produced two divergent varieties. Thus in the later days of Poseidonis there were several entirely different languages—all however belonging to the agglutinative type—for it was not till Fifth Race days that the descendants of the Semites and Akkadians developed inflectional speech. All through the ages, however, the Toltec language fairly maintained its purity, and the same tongue that was spoken in Atlantis in the days ...

— The Story of Atlantis and the Lost Lemuria • W. Scott-Elliot

Words linked to "Agglutinative" : polysynthetic, adhesive, agglutinate, synthetic