Esperanto: european or asiatic language?

III. AGGLUTINATIVE LANGUAGES

Agglutinative languages are characterized by invariant stems to which are added suffixes which cannot be used alone and whose vowels may change depending upon the vowel types found in the roots to which they are attached. Let us take the Turkish expression kırılmadılarmı? by way of an example. It is composed this way:

kır = break

ıl = past passive participle, -ed

ma = past tense

lar = they

mı = ?; sign of question

The word thus means ‘Weren’t they broken?’

Here are some other examples which underline the law of vowel harmony in Turkish. Depending upon whether the vowel of the root is e or a, the plural is expressed by -ler or -lar, ‘my’ by -im or -ım, and ‘to’ (direction, attribute, destiny) by -e or -a.

Two facts show that these suffixes are not words, and therefore, are entirely different from Esperanto (given in parentheses in the following examples). First, the Turkish vowels change:

Second, they are not used independently. For example ‘my’ is -im, -ım, -um, or -m:

But these suffixes (-um,-im, and so on) cannot be used separately to mean ‘my’. If a separate word is needed, one must say benim (literally ‘of me’, the personal pronoun (ben “I”, sen ‘you’) and the suffix that translates our possessive adjective (-im ‘my’, -in ‘your’).