Declension
In linguistics, declension (verb: to decline) is the changing of the form of a word, generally to express its syntactic function in the sentence, by way of some inflection. Declensions may apply to nouns, pronouns, adjectives, adverbs, and determiners to indicate number (e.g. singular, dual, plural), case (e.g. nominative case, accusative case, genitive case, dative case), gender (e.g. masculine, neuter, feminine), and a number of other grammatical categories. Meanwhile, the inflectional change of verbs is called conjugation.
Declension occurs in many of the world's languages. It is an important aspect of language families like Quechuan (i.e., languages native to the Andes), Indo-European (e.g. German, Icelandic, Lithuanian, Latvian, Slavic, Sanskrit, Latin, Ancient and Modern Greek, Albanian, Romanian, Kurdish, Classical and Modern Armenian), Bantu (e.g. 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 moved towards a mostly analytic language.
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History[edit]
It is agreed that Ancient Greeks had a "vague" idea of the forms of a noun in their language. A fragment of Anacreon seems to confirm this idea. Nevertheless, it cannot be concluded that the Ancient Greeks actually knew what the cases were. The Stoics developed many basic notions that today are the rudiments of linguistics. The idea of grammatical cases is also traced back to the Stoics, but it is still not completely clear what the Stoics exactly meant with their notion of cases.[9][10]
Unlike English, many languages use suffixes to specify subjects and objects and word cases in general. Inflected languages have a freer word order than modern English, an analytic language in which word order identifies the subject and object.[1][2] As an example, even though both of the following sentences consist of the same words, the meaning is different:[1]
Hypothetically speaking, suppose English were a language with a more complex declension system in which cases were formed by adding the suffixes:
The first sentence above could be formed with any of the following word orders and would have the same meaning:[1]
As a more complex example, the sentence:
becomes nonsensical in English if the words are rearranged (because there are no cases):
But if English were a highly inflected language, like Latin or some Slavic languages such as Croatian, both sentences could mean the same thing.[1] 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?);[3] 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).[4]
Using the case suffixes invented for this example, the original sentence would read:
And like other inflected languages, the sentence rearranged in the following ways would mean virtually the same thing, but with different expressiveness:[5]
Instead of the locative, the instrumental form of "down our street" could also be used:[6]
Different word orders preserving the original meaning are possible in an inflected language,[5] while modern English relies on word order for meaning, with a little flexibility.[1] 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,[7] and articles[8] are also declined.
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Just as verbs in Latin are conjugated to indicate grammatical information, Latin nouns and adjectives that modify them are declined to signal their roles in sentences. There are five important cases for Latin nouns: nominative, genitive, dative, accusative, and ablative. Since the vocative case usually takes the same form as the nominative, it is seldom spelt out in grammar books. Yet another case, the locative, is limited to a small number of words.
The usual basic functions of these cases are as follows:
The genitive, dative, accusative, and ablative also have important functions to indicate the object of a preposition.
Given below is the declension paradigm of Latin puer 'boy' and puella 'girl':
From the provided examples we can see how cases work:
Sanskrit, another Indo-European language, has eight cases: nominative, vocative, accusative, genitive, dative, ablative, locative and instrumental.[14] Some do not count vocative as a separate case, despite it having a distinctive ending in the singular, but consider it as a different use of the nominative.[15]
Sanskrit grammatical cases have been analyzed extensively. The grammarian Pāṇini identified six semantic roles or karaka, which correspond closely to the eight cases:[16]
For example, consider the following sentence:
Here leaf is the agent, tree is the source, and ground is the locus. The endings -aṁ, -at, -āu mark the cases associated with these meanings.
Verse 37 of the Rāmarakṣāstotram gives an example of all 8 types of declensions in Sanskrit for the singular proper noun Rāma.[17]
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