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Explore the people, places, events, achievements, struggles and stories that shaped our journey.
Movements, leaders, victories and the continuing fight for equality.
Innovation, patents, science, technology and world-changing contributions.
Pioneers, champions, Negro Leagues, records, activism and excellence.
Meet the people whose lives, choices and achievements shaped the journey.
Black towns, communities, institutions and places where history happened.
Moments that changed communities, movements, institutions and the nation.
In 1968 Shirley Chisholm became the first Black woman elected to the United States Congress. In 1972 she launched a campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination, breaking another political barrier.
MORE →Reflects the personal views, recollections, and perspective of the author, Mike Davis.
This is a personal recollection on the Move fire on May 13, 1985
| Linguistic typology |
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| Morphological |
| Morphosyntactic |
| Word order |
| Lexicon |
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.
Many Indo-European languages feature fusional morphology, including:
Another notable group of fusional languages is the Semitic languages, including Hebrew, Arabic, and Amharic. These also often involve nonconcatenative morphology, in which a word root is often placed into templates denoting its function in a sentence. Arabic is especially notable for this, with the common example being the root k-t-b being placed into multiple different patterns.
Northeast Caucasian languages are weakly fusional.
A limited degree of fusion is also found in many Uralic languages, like Hungarian, Estonian, Finnish, and the Sami languages, such as Skolt Sami, as they are primarily agglutinative.[citation needed]
Unusual for a Native North American language, Navajo is sometimes described as fusional because of its complex and inseparable verb morphology.[2][3]
Some Amazonian languages such as Ayoreo have fusional morphology.[4]
The Fuegian language Selkʼnam has fusional elements. For example, both evidentiality and gender agreement are coded with a single suffix on the verb:[5]
Some Nilo-Saharan languages such as Lugbara are also considered fusional.[6]
Fusional languages generally tend to lose their inflection over the centuries, some much more quickly than others.[7] Proto-Indo-European was fusional, but some of its descendants have shifted to a more analytic structure such as Modern English, Danish and Afrikaans or to agglutinative such as Persian and Armenian.
Other descendants remain fusional, including Sanskrit, Ancient Greek, Lithuanian, Latvian, Slavic languages, as well as Latin and the Romance languages and certain Germanic languages.
Some languages shift over time from agglutinative to fusional.
For example, most Uralic languages are predominantly agglutinative, but Estonian is markedly evolving in the direction of a fusional language. On the other hand, Finnish, its close relative, exhibits fewer fusional traits and thereby has stayed closer to the mainstream Uralic type. However, Sámi languages, while also part of the Uralic family, have gained more fusionality than Finnish and Estonian since they involve consonant gradation but also vowel apophony.
Inflections in fusional languages tend to fall in two patterns, based on which part of speech they modify: declensions for nouns and adjectives, and conjugations for verbs.
![[icon]](viewer.php?source=wikipedia&q=File%3AWiki%20letter%20w%20cropped.svg&result=0#selected-result){kind=small} | This section needs expansion. You can help by adding missing information. (May 2013) |
One feature of many fusional languages is their system of declensions in which nouns and adjectives have an affix attached to them that specifies grammatical case (their uses in the clause), number and grammatical gender. Pronouns may also alter their forms entirely to encode that information.
Within a fusional language, there are usually more than one declension; Latin and Greek have five, and the Slavic languages have anywhere between three and seven. German has multiple declensions based on the vowel or consonant ending the word, though they tend to be more unpredictable.
However, many descendants of fusional languages tend to lose their case marking. In most Romance and Germanic languages, including Modern English (with the notable exceptions of German, Icelandic and Faroese), encoding for case is merely vestigial because it no longer encompasses nouns and adjectives but only pronouns.
Compare the Italian egli (masculine singular nominative), gli (masculine singular dative, or indirect object), lo (masculine singular accusative) and lui (also masculine singular accusative but emphatic and indirect case to be used with prepositions), corresponding to the single vestigial trio he, him, his in English.
Conjugation is the alteration of the form of a verb to encode information about some or all of grammatical mood, voice, tense, aspect, person, grammatical gender and number. In a fusional language, two or more of those pieces of information may be conveyed in a single morpheme, typically a suffix.
For example, in French, the verbal suffix depends on the mood, tense and aspect of the verb, as well as on the person and number (but not the gender) of its subject. That gives rise to typically 45 different single-word forms of the verb, each of which conveys some or all of the following:
Changing any one of those pieces of information without changing the others requires the use of a different suffix, the key characteristic of fusionality.
English has two examples of conjugational fusion. The verbal suffix -s indicates a combination of present tense with both third-person and singularity of the associated subject, and the verbal suffix -ed used in a verb with no auxiliary verb conveys both non-progressive aspect and past tense.
Source: Wikipedia. Article content is retrieved live through the MediaWiki API.
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.
Czech ( CHEK; endonym: čeština [ˈtʃɛʃcɪna] ), historically known as Bohemian ( boh-HEE-mee-ən, bə-; Latin: lingua Bohemica), is a West Slavic language of the Czech–Slovak group, written in Latin script. Spoken by over 12 million people including second-language speakers, it serves as the official language of the Czech Republic. Czech is closely related to Slovak, to the point of high mutual intelligibility, as well as to Polish to a lesser degree. Czech is a fusional language with a rich system of morphology and relatively flexible word order. Its vocabulary has been extensively influenced by Latin and German. The Czech–Slovak group developed within West Slavic in the high medieval period, and the standardization of Czech and Slovak within the Czech–Slovak dialect continuum emerged in the early modern period. In the later 18th to mid-19th century, the modern written standard became codified in the context of the Czech National Revival. The most widely spoken non-standard variety, known as Common Czech, is based on the vernacular of Prague, but is now spoken as an interdialect throughout most of Bohemia. The Moravian dialects spoken in Moravia and Czech Silesia are considerably more varied than the dialects of Bohemia. Czech has a moderately-sized phoneme inventory, comprising ten monophthongs, three diphthongs and 25 consonants (divided into "hard", "neutral" and "soft" categories). Words may contain complicated consonant clusters or lack vowels altogether. Czech has a raised alveolar trill, which is known to occur as a phoneme in only a few other languages, represented by the grapheme ř.
Polish (endonym: język polski, [ˈjɛ̃zɘ̟k ˈpɔlskʲi] , polszczyzna [pɔlˈʂt͡ʂɘ̟zna] or simply polski, [ˈpɔlskʲi] ) is a West Slavic language of the Lechitic subgroup, within the Indo-European language family, and is written in the Latin script. It is primarily spoken in Poland and serves as the official language of the country, as well as the language of the Polish diaspora around the world. In 2024, there were over 39.7 million Polish native speakers. It ranks as the sixth-most-spoken among languages of the European Union. Polish is subdivided into regional dialects. It maintains strict T–V distinction, obligatory honorifics, and other formalities when addressing individuals. The traditional 32-letter Polish alphabet has nine additions (ą, ć, ę, ł, ń, ó, ś, ź, ż) to the letters of the basic 26-letter Latin alphabet, while removing three (x, q, v). Those three letters are at times included in an extended 35-letter alphabet. The traditional set comprises 23 consonants and nine written vowels, including two nasal vowels (ę, ą) denoted by a reversed diacritic hook called an ogonek. Polish is a synthetic and fusional language which has seven grammatical cases. It has fixed penultimate stress and an abundance of palatal consonants. Contemporary Polish developed in the 1700s as the successor to the medieval Old Polish (10th–16th centuries) and Middle Polish (16th–18th centuries). Among the major languages, it is most closely related to Slovak and Czech but differs in terms of pronunciation and general grammar. In addition, Polish was profoundly influenced by Latin and other Romance languages like Italian and French as well as Germanic languages (most notably German), which contributed a large number of loanwords and grammatical structures. Extensive usage of nonstandard dialects has also shaped the standard language; many colloquialisms and expressions were directly borrowed from German or Yiddish and subsequently adopted into the vernacular of Polish in everyday use. Historically, Polish was a lingua franca, important both diplomatically and academically in Central and part of Eastern Europe. In addition to being the official language of Poland, Polish is also spoken as a second language in eastern Germany, northern Czech Republic and Slovakia, western parts of Belarus and Ukraine as well as in southeast Lithuania and Latvia. Because of the emigration from Poland during different time periods, most notably after World War II, millions of Polish speakers can also be found in countries such as Canada, Argentina, Brazil, Israel, Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States.
Russian is an East Slavic language belonging to the Balto-Slavic branch of the Indo-European language family. It is one of the four extant East Slavic languages, and is the native language of the Russian people. Russian was the de facto (and de jure in its final years) official language of the former Soviet Union. It has remained an official language of Russia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, and Kyrgyzstan, has constitutional status as the language of inter-ethnic communication in Tajikistan, and is still used as a lingua franca in Ukraine, Moldova, the Caucasus, Central Asia, and to a lesser extent in the Baltic states and Israel. Russian has over 210 million total speakers worldwide. It is the most spoken native language in Europe, the most spoken Slavic language, and the most geographically widespread language of Eurasia. It is the world's seventh-most spoken language by number of native speakers, and the world's eleventh-most spoken language by total number of speakers. Russian is one of two official languages aboard the International Space Station, one of the six official languages of the United Nations, as well as the seventh most widely used language on the Internet. Russian is written using the Russian alphabet of the Cyrillic script; it distinguishes between consonant phonemes with palatal secondary articulation and those without, the so-called "soft" and "hard" sounds. Almost every consonant has hard–soft counterparts, and the distinction is a prominent feature of the language, which is usually shown in writing not by a change of the consonant but rather by changing the following vowel. Another important aspect is the reduction of unstressed vowels. Stress, which is often unpredictable, is not normally indicated orthographically, though an optional acute accent may be used to mark stress, such as to distinguish between homographic words (e.g. замо́к [zamók, 'lock'] and за́мок [zámok, 'castle']), or to indicate the proper pronunciation of uncommon words or proper nouns. Russian is a typical fusional language, where a single inflectional morpheme at the end of a word is used to denote multiple grammatical features. In addition to inflection for morphology Russian also actively uses prefixes and suffixes for word formation, more so than most other Slavic languages. Also, Russian uses descriptive phrases (like железная дорога, zheleznaya doroga, lit. 'iron road') where other Slavic languages often prefer single-word derivatives (such as Czech železnice).
Before the 1921 destruction of Tulsa’s Greenwood District, Black residents had created a remarkable center of business and community life. The district included stores, professional offices, entertainment venues and homes owned by Black citizens. Understanding Greenwood means learning what was built—not only what was burned.
MORE →Madam C.J. Walker
