1250: How Turkish Words Get So Long May 12, 2018

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Turkish and Finnish agglutination were brought up in the latest the latest Word facts video, but no example was given. In the video it showed how Germanic languages allows for compounding of terms within a single lexical class (e.g having strings of nouns acting together as one word) and polysynthetic languages can attach affixes to indicate meaning that connotes ideas that would belong to multiple lexical classes, but synthetic languages are somewhere in the middle. Turkish, for instance, can pack a lot of information into one word very similarly to polysynthetic languages. As you can see in the chart below, shows that affixes, particularly suffixes (and then infixes) can be added to one word in order to indicate meaning which in English would have to involve prepositions (which is also true of less agglutinative languages like Latin), verbs, and adjectives. There are still more limitations to this than in, say, Greenlandic (Kalaallisut), but are still more productive than in English.

To see some hypothetical Word Facts, visit Patreon.com/wordfacts. Check out the latest Youtube video too: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vqYX2heE0T0




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