Fusional language

Fusional languages or inflected languages are a type of synthetic language, distinguished from agglutinative languages by their tendency to use single inflectional morphemes to denote multiple grammatical, syntactic, or semantic features.

For example, the Spanish verb comer ("to eat") has the active first-person singular indicative preterite tense form comí ("I ate") where just one suffix, -í, denotes the intersection of the active voice, the first person, the singular number, the indicative mood, and preterite (which is the combination of the past tense and perfective aspect), instead of having a separate affix for each feature.

Another illustration of fusionality is the Latin adjective 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.

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