Agglutinative Languages
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Agglutinative languages form words through the combination of smaller morphemes to express compound ideas. Each of these morphemes generally has one meaning or function and retains its original form and meaning during the combination process. For languages that have agglutinative morphology, such as Turkish, Finnish, Hungarian, or Korean, it is possible to produce thousands of forms for a given root word.
The following table shows a list of inflected forms for the Finnish word "talo" ("house").
| Word | Translation |
|---|---|
| Talo | House |
| Taloni | My house |
| Talossa | In the house |
| Talossani | In my house |
| Taloja | Houses |
| Taloissa | In the houses |
Inflected languages, such as English, French, and Latin, have a very small number of possible word forms for a given root word. In inflected languages, morphemes influence one another when binding. Most changes in inflection are present in the stem or word ending. In contrast to agglutinative languages, inflected languages tend to have different functions for a single morpheme. For example, a morpheme can determine both number and case.
Stemmers for agglutinative languages must weigh the trade-off between performance and accuracy to generate only a subset of the number of possible word forms.