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> Finnish and Estonian are also agglutinative

Finnish and Estonian are synthetic languages now. While the Proto-Uralic language ancestral to them both was more agglutinative, the system of consonant gradation (and subsequent loss of consonants) as it developed in these languages means they are no longer very agglutinative.

In a purely agglutinative language you only have to memorize one stem for a word and then you can add all case endings to that one stem. In Finnish, you have to memorize at least two stems (strong and weak stems). In Estonian, things are even more complicated.



Current limitations of English centric software language parsing means it's annoying to type machine generated or parseable text in Finnish.

For example pinging people in Facebook comments doesn't work with correct Finnish.

English: "this would be useful to @Pekka"

Correct Finnish: "tämä olisi hyödyllistä @Pekalle".

Machine parseable but incorrect Finnish: "tämä olisi hyödyllistä @Pekka :lle"

It would probably be possible to make a library to understand the transformed forms of words.


Consonant gradation/assimilation happens at the surface phonology and do not affect the morphological ground form. We have a similar voicing assimilation in Turkish; however, devoicing is progressively applied and do not propagate more than one syllable, unlike Finnish.




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