Fusional language

Fusional languages or inflected languages are a type of synthetic language, distinguished from agglutinative languages by their tendency to use a single inflectional morpheme to denote multiple grammatical, syntactic, or semantic features. For example, the Spanish verb comer ("to eat") has the first-person singular preterite tense form comí ("I ate"); the single suffix -í represents both the features of first-person singular agreement and preterite tense, instead of having a separate affix for each feature. Another illustration of fusionality is the Latin word bonus ("good"). The ending -us denotes masculine gender, nominative case, and singular number. Changing any one of these features requires replacing the suffix -us with a different one. In the form bonum, the ending -um denotes masculine accusative singular, neuter accusative singular, or neuter nominative singular. Examples of fusional Indo-European languages include the Balto-Slavic languages, such as Polish, Russian, Ukrainian and South Slavic languages (with the exception of Bulgarian and Macedonian, which are partially analytic); Sanskrit, Pashto, modern Indo-Aryan languages (such as Persian, Hindustani, Kashmiri, and Punjabi); Greek (Classical and Modern), Latin, Italian, French, Spanish, Portuguese and Romanian; Irish, Welsh, German, Faroese, Icelandic and Albanian. Northeast Caucasian languages are weakly fusional. Another notable group of fusional languages is the Semitic languages although Modern Hebrew is much more analytic than Classical Hebrew "both with nouns and with verbs". Colloquial varieties of Arabic are more analytic than Modern Standard Arabic, have lost all noun declensions and in many cases also feature a simplified conjugation. A limited degree of fusion is also found in many Uralic languages, like Hungarian, Estonian, Finnish, and the Sami languages, such as Skolt Sami, as they are primarily agglutinative. Unusual for a Native North American language, Navajo is sometimes described as fusional because of its complex and inseparable verb morphology.