Linguistics

The twenty-sixth entry is agglutinant, and its root is one English handles every day without noticing it there. The adjective goes back to Latin agglutinare, to glue on, built on gluten, glue. An agglutinating language sticks its pieces together in a row, each piece doing one job, so that a single Turkish word such as evlerimde, in my houses, is house, plural, my and in, glued end to end. What makes the image easy for a French reader is that the glue never left the language. La glu is the sticky paste once smeared on twigs to catch small birds, gluant means sticky, engluer is to trap something in it, and s’engluer dans une affaire is to get bogged down in one. English took that very noun from Old French and made it « glue », so the family is present on both sides of the Channel and merely hidden on ours. Even the protein in wheat is called « gluten » because it makes dough stick. Hear the glue in agglutinant and the term explains itself.