Agglutination, the Examples of Hungarian and Japanese

Abstract

Some languages use a very high number of prefixes, suffixes, endings, ending complexes to bring out syntactic functions, while the stem is basically unchanged. This is called agglutination.

In this paper, I am going to quote words with their endings, taken from Hungarian and Japanese sentences. Even though the endings in these words, (quoted in these two languages) are linguistically not corresponding to each other, the two languages behave in a similar way. The question of linguistic relationship is beyond my scope.

First, words will be quoted with one, two, three or more endings, prefixes, etc. Then sentences will be presented in the Japanese language from a famous Japanese folk tale "Kaguya-Hime ('Princess Kaguya') and the Hungarian translation of the same sentences. Then the endings, prefixes, etc., will be counted in these sentences. The number of these elements is very high in both languages. In Japanese it is noticeably higher than in Hungarian. Both languages can be taken for characteristic examples of the linguistic phenomenon, called "agglutination". However, Japanese is more "agglutinative" than Hungarian.