On agglutinative languages

Here is a lovely short introduction to the concepts of synthetic and analytic, fusional and agglutinative (oh, I love this word!) languages.

Agglutinative comes from the Latin word agglutinare, which means to glue to or fasten to a thing. The Russian equivalent is a real tongue-twister: агглютинативный.

This Wikipedia article gives a more detailed, yet understandible, definition of the term.