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It seems like Indo-European languages are always stuck between throwing away complicated fusional grammar (like English) or retaining most of it (like Russian). Are there any Indo-European languages that reanalyzed the verb system into agglutination with series of suffixes rather than trying to stuff complex tense, aspect, and person information into a single arbitrarily chosen suffix?

Or is it generally a rule that languages evolve away from agglutination and never towards it? It seems, for example, that Modern Japanese is a bit more fusional rather than agglutinative due to certain sound changes - for example in Classical Japanese "ikitari" went simplifying into "ikita" (which prevented further addition of affixes since -ta is not a verb citation form ending) and then fused into "itta", which obscures the root "ik", thus becoming somewhat fusional.

vectory
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ithisa
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    Are you only interested in languages which are agglutinative in the verbs? I think Armenian is fairly agglutinative, but mainly in the noun phrase, and not much in verbs. I think Persian is fairly agglutinative in its verbal system. – Gaston Ümlaut May 07 '13 at 04:42
  • Yes, the verbs. German, for example, agglutinates a lot in the nouns but noun agglutination is an easy gluing. – ithisa May 07 '13 at 10:37
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    @EricDong: Don't confusde agglutination with noun compounds. For German to have agglutination in its nouns would mean, for example, that it had completely separate plural and case morphemes either or both of which may be present or absent but in a fixed order. – hippietrail May 07 '13 at 22:32
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    To clear up misconceptions about Armenian I see mentioned here: it is not agglutinative. Armenian uses mostly postpositions, but so do many other IE languages, and there is also German entlang etc and arguably English ago. It also has more IE case system, including locative and ablative. And like in the core (IE) Balkansprachbund the definite article follows the noun and is suffix-like. It is is also fairly regular. So you end up with "(I) car-LOC am" for "I am in the car", which seems agglutinative. – Adam Bittlingmayer Sep 03 '16 at 12:54
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    However, it is not extensible, it cannot get deeper than that first level of case ending/suffix. In fact it the article is even lost. The postpositions still require case and are separate words, as is the copula - not suffixes. There was intense contact with Hurro-Urartian and other Caucasian languages so like Hittite or Lydian it could have acquired the thin veneer of agglutination but Armenian is not agglutinative. – Adam Bittlingmayer Sep 03 '16 at 12:55
  • I believe the same general factors and conclusion apply to Ossetian, which is notable for having thrown away its IE case system and developed a new one, thus avoiding adpositions. – Adam Bittlingmayer Sep 03 '16 at 13:05
  • "Or is it generally a rule that languages evolve away from agglutination and never towards it?" No, we even have a tag fot typological cycle – vectory Feb 16 '19 at 12:29

4 Answers4

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Among ancient languages, there are certain traits of aggluttination in Hittite (especially in its verbs of mi-class).

If you are interested in living languages, then one of the possible suggestions would be verbs of the regular -ar or -er types in modern Swedish. The -ar- type is a type of verbs of regular declention taking, like the rest of regular Swedish verbs, a similar ending (here, -ar) for all and any personal forms in Present.

Consider e.g. the verb att svara (to answer):

     Sg.                          Pl.

1.  jag svarar                        vi svarar

2.  du svarar                         ni svarar

3.  hen svarar                        de [dom] svarar

NB: hen is a new coinage, presumably a calque from the Finnish hän. Both new Swedish and the Finnish words mean the same: (s)he. The actual and more exact gender-specific pronouns in Swedish are hon for 'she' and han for 'he'.

Now let's make a Past Tense form:

   Sg.                          Pl.

1.  jag svarade                 vi svarade

2.  du svarade                  ni svarade

3.  hen svarade                 de [dom] svarade

Finally, the Passive Form would be

svaras (it is answered = ´svara+ s ') and svarades (it was answered/answering = 'svara+*de*+s').

But there is more of agglunativity in Swedish nouns, though:-)

Consider e.g. the word eld (fire).

The plural form is eld+ar (yes, unlike -or, the -er and -ar endings are applicable for nouns and verbs, although the adjectives have a different plural - or, actually, emphasised - form).

The postpositional definite article is -na; hence, 'the fires' will be

eld+ar+na => eldarna

UPD: the -na here conveys the meaning of both plurality and definitiveness, and can be divided into -n- (postpositive plural definite marker) + a (emphasised form of a noun applicable in plural only).

So, this form of word can be further structured as eld+ar+n+a => eldarna

Morover, there is a common Germanic survival of the Genitive case, which is - suprisingly! - s.

Hence, 'of [the] fires' (like in 'light of [the] fires') will be

[[eld+ar+n+a+s] ljus] => eldarnas ljus

Manjusri
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    I would like to see an example of Swedish noun agglutination too please. Especially since it's clear the OP was confusing agglutination and noun compounding. – hippietrail Jun 07 '13 at 01:02
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    I've added up some information. – Manjusri Jun 07 '13 at 05:45
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    Nevertheless, Swedish is still not an agglutinative language in the strict sense (compare for instance with Finnish). I guess the answer is that that there is no IE agglutinative language, but there are languages that demonstrate certain agglutinative features.

    PS: This comment is also true for my suggestion below, regarding Lydian

     – Midas Jan 23 '15 at 14:31
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    One possible problem with calling Scandinavian verb endings agglutinative is the passive suffix -s: in the present tense, it replaces (or elides) the conjugational ending -r, whereas in the past tense, it is added on to the past-tense ending -de. This would suggest that -s has to be analyzed as the "present-passive" suffix in one tense, but simply as the "passive" suffix in the other tense, and this might be enough of a basis to term -s and -r as "fusional" affixes. – user8017 Feb 08 '15 at 14:47
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    @Midas How would you define an agglutinative language in the strict sense? As far as I can tell, agglutinativity is not a property of languages but of specific morphemes, and some languages simply have more such morphemes than others. Finnish has some arguably non-agglutinative affixes (e.g. noun plurality is expressed with different affixes depending on the case form), and Estonian is noticeably less agglutinative overall than Finnish, possibly less so than many IE languages. – user8017 Feb 08 '15 at 14:53
  • @user8017 : Many languages have a degree of agglutination, but there is some limit that qualifies an agglutinative language and a language with agglutinative traits. I am Swedish, while my wife is a Turkish native speaker. Agglutination in Turkish is a "conscious", if I may describe it like that, mechanism of that language. You're aware of it. In Swedish is more like "oh, you could say that reminds of agglutination", if you actually know what agglutination is. The vast majority of Swedes have never even heard that word. – Midas Sep 01 '18 at 07:44
  • Most (or a great, great many) Turkish speakers have never heard the term "agglutination", either. I'm not sure how you assess that it is a conscious process for Turkish speakers? – user8017 Sep 01 '18 at 07:49
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    @user8017: That is not true. Turkish kids are being taught in school specifically about "sondan eklemeli diller" (that's how they describe agglutinative languages) and that Turkish is such a language. They are actively being taught how adding multiple morphemes (suffixes) in the end of a root modifies the meaning/context. – Midas Sep 03 '18 at 19:54
  • The fact that there is a didactic tradition in Turkey of describing the language as agglutinative doesn't prove that Turkish has some kind of agglutinative essence that Swedish/English lack. Turksh could well be more agglutinative than Swedish or English, but that's a matter of degree. I can't think of any force that would prevent fusional morphemes from developing in Turkish, just as I see nothing wrong with calling some English morphemes (such as possessive 's) agglutinative. – user8017 Sep 03 '18 at 20:12
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    @user8017: You made a statement regarding the awareness of Turks on agglutinative languages which was wrong, hence my answer. Turkish agglutination degree is essensial to classify it as an agglutinative language. That is not the case for Swedish or English even though they demonstate some agglutinative traits. In that sense you could put Greek (asia Minor dialects) and Anatolian languages into the same group. – Midas Sep 04 '18 at 05:21
  • @user8017: Degrees have a threshhold when doing classification. In phychology, all individuals share traits that are autistic, but that doesn't make them autistic unless a larger number of those traits exist. The same is true in our case. Swedish is by no means classified as an agglutinative language and there is no cosensus for that. – Midas Sep 04 '18 at 05:26
  • I interpreted the term "conscious" in your earlier post as referring to natural awareness by Turkish speakers of the purported agglutinative nature of their language. But based on your next comment, it seems that you meant "conscious" in the sense of something explicitly taught to speakers and remembered by them (and that uneducated speakers, or speakers who lived before the current didactic tradition, are therefore not affected by). – user8017 Sep 04 '18 at 05:30
  • @Midas The question is whether it is justified to do such classification in the first place (i.e., in this case, to label entire languages "agglutinative" or "fusional", as opposed to specific morphemes). I don't think there is any point to doing this, unless you can point to evidence that "agglutination" is an organizing principle of Turkish or other languages, something that allows us to predict how the language will develop in the future or describe how it has developed in the past. – user8017 Sep 04 '18 at 05:42
  • @user8017: How uneducated people would percieve this is not something anyone of us here can objectively judge. What I can assure you of is that a Turkish person learning a second language like English or Swedish notices immediately the difference in sentence building. They have difficulties with articles and especially prepositions being separate words. You will often hear sentences like "I go Turkey" instead of "I will go to Turkey". It is not how their language works. – Midas Sep 04 '18 at 19:13
  • @user8017 This classification exists for almost 200 years now, so I don't see why suddenly it would lack justification. It is a typological feature of certain languages that makes them stand out. Turkish has an organized principle when it comes to agglutination. Here is an example of how it works in Turkish: https://i.redditmedia.com/vpoJTaBCUiIVcMJgAfxKucNiI0x_1Xa_mzmN9xX6WEM.jpg?w=729&s=bb222ea8428399c487d8f9a2aa93d9b6

    Also, since languages might drop, develop or inherit agglutination, it makes it important in terms of language history and development.

     – Midas Sep 04 '18 at 19:23
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The Lydian language was distinct from all other Indo-European languages for its agglutinative features. I don't know all the details, but there was an extensive usage of infixes. Generally, all Indo-European Anatolian languages had some kind of agglutinative qualities, apparently because of the substratum languages that were agglutinative e.g. Hattic and Hurrian. Nevetheless, that does not qualify them as agglutinative in the same sense as Korean, Japanese, Turkish, Basque, Berber and so on. On the other hand Tocharian languages changed their IE infectional structure into the agglutinative morphosyntactic type with multi-morphemic endings and suffixes e.g. Toch. B cämp-am-ñe-tstse 'to have the ability'.

As a conclusion, there are very few IE-languages that can be counted as having agglutinative features. As a native Swedish speaker I do not consider myself speaking a language with agglutinative qualities in the same extend as when I compare to Lydian, Tocharian or languages from the Uralic, Caucasian and Altaic language families.

Midas
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As mentioned, modern Scandinavian (Swedish, Danish, Norwegian) seems like a fairly straightforward example of agglutinative IE languages: the only major exceptions to the agglutination in these languages (that I can think of) are the verbs whose past tense is formed with ablaut rather than suffixes.

Armenian (or at least Western Armenian -- I haven't studied Eastern) doesn't seem especially agglutinative in its noun or verb system. Although its nouns do not have gender classes and the plural ending -(n)er is used for almost all nouns (I don't recall any exceptions at the moment), many words have irregular case endings. Its verb system has three main conjugation classes, the personal endings are not the same in the past and present tense, and there are many different patterns in the formation of past-tense stems.

user8017
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Persian is classified as an agglutinative language. Also, it seems more likely that rather than simply evolving away from inflection to analytic properties, this only occurs when languages come into contact. Take English, for example. Old English had five cases (if I recall correctly) and lost all but the genitive after hundreds of years of contact with French. Likewise, Mandarin Chinese, being a widely spoken language, would have had to be learned by millions of new speakers who, in practise, would not all have used the language correctly. This is why major languages tend toward analytic properties - inflection is used to a minimum by new speakers. In contrast, isolated groups tend toward languages which have a higher morpheme-word ratio. Australian Aboriginal languages are mostly agglunating; these are used only in small groups of people over large areas, meaning there are few second-language speakers. North American languages are another example, as are the Uralic languages, and even Proto-Indo-European, which was theoretically spoken only in a comparatively small region of the Caucasus. Languages can become more inflected through the process of grammaticalisation. A hypothetical example of this would be if English speakers began using prepositions as prefixes, and after many generations these prefixes lost all meaning as independent morphemes, simply becoming locative cases. Therefore, languages (when isolated from contact with other tongues) could in theory tend toward inflection rather than using analytic structures to convey meaning. If I'm incorrect about any of this, correct me. Hope this helped.

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    Can we be sure that 'contact with French' was the cause of English casting off its case-system? Why not just simplification, or increasing the use of prepositions and word-order to avoid misunderstanding between dialects? – David Garner Jan 27 '15 at 16:04
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    Do you have any evidence for this theory? I've never heard anyone suggest that the level of inflection in a language depends on how isolated it is, and frankly that doesn't make much sense. – curiousdannii Jan 31 '15 at 01:12
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    Well, just one example: Icelandic versus all the other living Germanic languages. Other examples to follow! – David Garner Feb 02 '15 at 09:44
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    @curiousdannii for more on morphological complexity and case studies of its relationship to isolation, see Sampson et al., Language Complexity as an Evolving Variable. – melissa_boiko Sep 04 '16 at 23:32