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The inflected form of a word often contains both one or more free morphemes (a unit of meaning which can stand by itself as a word), and one or more bound morphemes (a unit of meaning which cannot stand alone as a word). For example, the English word cars is a noun that is inflected for number, specifically to express the plural; the content ...
Tamil words consist of a lexical root to which one or more affixes are attached. Most Tamil affixes are suffixes. Tamil suffixes can be derivational suffixes, which either change the part of speech of the word or its meaning, or inflectional suffixes, which mark categories such as person, number, mood, tense, etc.
Dravidian languages include Tamil, Malayalam, Kannada, Telugu, and a number of other languages spoken mainly in South Asia. The list is by no means exhaustive. Some of the words can be traced to specific languages, but others have disputed or uncertain origins. Words of disputed or less certain origin are in the "Dravidian languages" list.
Inflected languages have a freer word order than modern English, an analytic language in which word order identifies the subject and object. [1] [2] As an example, even though both of the following sentences consist of the same words, the meaning is different: [1] "The dog chased a cat." "A cat chased the dog."
In Tamil, an agglutinative language, the verb stem (which is also the imperative form - the least marked one) is often cited, e.g., இரு. In Irish, words are highly inflected by case (genitive, nominative, dative and vocative) and by their place within a sentence because of initial mutations.
English that is spoken today is not the same as it was 10 years ago or 100 years ago or 1,000 years ago—language is constantly evolving—and just because there is no clear boundary between something called 'old Tamil' and 'modern Tamil' does not mean that Tamil spoken 2,000 years ago is the same as Tamil spoken today.
A plaque in Chechen, an agglutinative language. Agglutinative languages have words containing several morphemes that are always clearly differentiable from one another in that each morpheme represents only one grammatical meaning and the boundaries between those morphemes are easily demarcated; that is, the bound morphemes are affixes, and they ...
In many languages, words appear in several inflected forms. For example, in English, the verb 'to walk' may appear as 'walk', 'walked', 'walks' or 'walking'. The base form, 'walk', that one might look up in a dictionary, is called the lemma for the word. The association of the base form with a part of speech is often called a lexeme of the word.