wren ng thornton wrote:
Indeed. The proliferation of compound words is noteworthy, but it's not generally considered an agglutinative language. From what (very little) German I know compounds tend to be restricted to nouns, as opposed to languages like Turkish, Japanese, Korean,...
Yes, compounds are restricted to nouns in German. But as I understand it, agglutinative relates more to the inflection system than to the lexicon anyway. In German, inflection is usually done by adding a single suffix to the stem, and possibly altering the stem. The single suffix encodes various informations (e.g. number, gender and case for nouns) in a single morpheme. In an agglutinative language, inflection is done by adding one morpheme per information. Tillmann