Inflection

Inflection, variations or changes in the form of a word to indicate its relations with other words and changes in meaning. Inflection includes conjugation of verbs, which comprises such distinctions in verbs as number, tense, person, mood, and voice (as in English go, goes, went, gone); declension, which comprises such distinctions in nouns and adjectives as number, case and gender (as in Spanish muchacha “girl”, muchachas “girls”, muchacho “boy”, muchachos “boys”); and the forms that indicate comparison (such as big, bigger, biggest). Characteristic of inflection are internal word changes, such as English ring, rang, rung, and the use of affixes that are fused to their roots, having no independent existence or meaning, such as -ing, in walking, -ed in spelled, and -es in arches.

The entire Indo-European language system is marked by more or less elaborate systems of inflections, one of the most complex of which appears to have been exhibited by Proto-Indo-European. Most modern Indo-European languages display both internal inflectional change and external affixes, often simultaneously in a single word (as German Männer from Mann or English sold from sell). Internal inflectional change is especially characteristic of the Semitic languages. Chinese is an example of a language that does not use inflection at all.

In their historical development many Indo-European languages, such as French and English, have modified or dropped their inflections. This loss of inflectional forms is perhaps best typified in English, where the order of words in a sentence takes over some function of inflection. Loss of inflection represents a loss of compactness; some Latin sentences, for example, more than double in wordage when translated literally into English. On the other hand, this evolution tends to simplify the grammatical structure of a language; a Greek verb, for example, may have as many as 249 different forms. The study of inflections is a part of morphology, a branch in the study of grammar.