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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. R. Morris. Cf. man-kind, heir-loom, war-like, which are agglutinative compounds. The Finnish, Hungarian, Turkish, t…

n in which root words are united with little or no change of form or loss of meaning. See Agglutinative, 2.

A family of languages, mostly of the isolating type, although some are agglutinative, spoken in the great area extending from northern India in the west to Formosa in the east and from Central Asia in the north to the Malay Peninsula in the south.

with variable terminations or suffixes which were once independent words. English is both agglutinative, as, manlike, headache, and inflective, as, he, his, him. Cf. Agglutinative.

Characterized by polysynthesis; agglutinative. Polysynthetic twinning (Min.), repeated twinning, like that of the triclinic feldspar, producing fine parallel bands in alternately reversed positions.