This quality, which linguists describe as “polysynthetic,” means that many affixes may attach to a verb—and with each additional affix another layer of story accrues.

Kanyen’keha is a polysynthetic language, where a single word can function as an entire sentence.

Additionally, many Indigenous languages are polysynthetic; they do not have fixed vocabularies but rely instead on the recombinations of small building blocks of words.

Unrelated to any other language, its grammar is complex and its structure polysynthetic; a verb conveys not just action but a wealth of other information.

When often repeated on the same plane, the twinning is said to be “polysynthetic,” and gives rise to a laminated structure in the crystal.