Editing Fusional language (section)

{{Short description|Language where one kind of inflection indicates multiple changes of aspect}}{{Linguistic typology topics}}

'''Fusional languages''' or '''inflected languages''' are a type of [[synthetic language]], distinguished from [[agglutinative language]]s by their tendency to use single [[inflection]]al [[morpheme]]s to denote multiple [[grammar|grammatical]], [[syntactic]], or [[semantic]] features. 

For example, the [[Spanish language|Spanish]] [[verb]] ''comer'' ("to eat") has the [[Grammatical person|first-person]] [[Grammatical number|singular]] [[preterite]] tense form ''comí'' ("I ate"); the single [[suffix]] ''-í'' represents ''both'' the features of first-person singular [[Agreement (linguistics)|agreement]] and preterite tense, instead of having a separate [[affix]] for each feature.

Another illustration of fusionality is the [[Latin language|Latin]] word {{lang|la|bonus}} ("good"). The ending {{lang|la|-us}} denotes masculine [[grammatical gender|gender]], [[nominative case]], and singular [[grammatical number|number]]. Changing any one of these features requires replacing the suffix {{lang|la|-us}} with a different one. In the form {{lang|la|bonum}}, the ending {{lang|la|-um}} denotes masculine [[accusative case|accusative]] singular, neuter accusative singular, or neuter nominative singular.