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Declension

Inflection of words according to number, gender, and/or case

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Declension occurs in many languages. It is an important aspect of language families like Quechuan (i.e., languages native to the Andes), Indo-European (e.g. German, Icelandic, Irish, Lithuanian and Latvian, Slavic, Sanskrit, Latin, Ancient and Modern Greek, Albanian, Romanian, Kurdish, and Modern Armenian), Bantu (e.g. Swahili, Zulu, Kikuyu), Semitic (e.g. Modern Standard Arabic), Finno-Ugric (e.g. Hungarian, Finnish, Estonian), and Turkic (e.g. Turkish).

Old English was an inflectional language, but largely abandoned inflectional changes as it evolved into Modern English. Though traditionally classified as synthetic, Modern English has become a mostly analytic language.

English-speaking perspective

Unlike English, many languages use suffixes to specify subjects and objects or word relationships in general. These inflections identify the specific grammatical function of a word within a sentence, known as its case. Different endings mark words as the thing performing an action (subject), things directly receiving the action (direct object), things indirectly receiving the action and objects of prepositions (indirect object), objects of prepositions, and things possessed by other things (genitive).

Inflected languages have a freer word order than modern English, an analytic language in which word order identifies the subject and object. As an example, even though both of the following sentences consist of the same words, the meaning is different:

  • "The dog chased a cat."
  • "A cat chased the dog."

Hypothetically speaking, suppose English were a language with a more complex declension system in which cases were formed by adding the suffixes:

-no (for nominative singular), -ge (genitive), -da (dative), -ac (accusative), -lo (locative), -in (instrumental), -vo (vocative), -ab (ablative)

The first sentence above could be formed with any of the following word orders and would have the same meaning:

  • "The dogno chased a catac."
  • "A catac chased the dogno."
  • "Chased a catac the dogno."

As a more complex example, the sentence:

  • Mum, this little boy's dog was chasing a cat down our street!

becomes nonsensical in English if the words are rearranged (because there are no cases):

  • A cat was down our street chasing dog this little boy's mum!

But if English were a highly inflected language, like Latin or some Slavic languages such as Croatian, both sentences could mean the same thing. They would both contain five nouns in five different cases: mum – vocative (hey!), dog – nominative (who?), boy – genitive (of whom?), cat – accusative (whom?), street – locative (where?); the adjective little would be in the same case as the noun it modifies (boy), and the case of the determiner our would agree with the case of the noun it determines (street).

Using the case suffixes invented for this example, the original sentence would read:

  • Mumvo, thisge littlege boyge dogno was chasing a catac down ourlo streetlo!

And like other inflected languages, the sentence rearranged in the following ways would mean virtually the same thing, but with different expressiveness:

  • A catac was down ourlo streetlo chasing dogno thisge littlege boyge, mumvo!
  • Mumvo, down streetlo ourlo a catac was chasing thisge littlege boyge dogno!

Instead of the locative, the instrumental form of "down our street" could also be used:

  • Mumvo, thisge littlege boyge dogno ourin streetin was chasing a catac!
  • A catac was, mumvo, ourin streetin chasing dogno thisge littlege boyge
  • Ourin streetin a catac was chasing dogno thisge littlege boyge, mumvo!

Different word orders preserving the original meaning are possible in an inflected language, while modern English relies on word order for meaning, with a little flexibility. This is one of the advantages of an inflected language. The English sentences above, when read without the made-up case suffixes, are confusing.

These contrived examples are relatively simple, whereas actual inflected languages have a far more complicated set of declensions, where the suffixes (or prefixes or infixes) change depending on the gender of the noun, the quantity of the noun, and other possible factors. This complexity and the possible lengthening of words is one of the disadvantages of inflected languages. Notably, many of these languages lack articles. There may also be irregular nouns where the declensions are unique for each word (like irregular verbs with conjugation). In inflected languages, other parts of speech such as numerals, demonstratives, adjectives, and articles are also declined.

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