Thursday, 19 May 2016

grammar - Is Japanese really an agglutinative language?


In the linguistics topic of language typology, Japanese is often included in lists of agglutinative (or agglutinating) languages, but when learning or reading about Japanese grammar exclusively this is rarely if ever mentioned. Other examples of agglutinative languages are Turkish, Finnish, Hungarian, and Basque.


Languages always considered agglutinative usually talk about things like lots of case inflections on nouns or lots of "slots" for various infixes and affixes in the potentially long endings of both verbs and nouns. Japanese in contrast usually talks about lots of particles and lots of verb endings only.


So is it true that Japanese is an agglutinative language and how should we regard this in relation to how we normally discuss Japanese grammar?




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