Inflection
Table of contents
Word Order
In English, we usually rely on word order to help us understand how words function within a sentence. Take a look at the order of the words in the following two sentences:
- The boy loves the girl.
- The girl loves the boy.
Both sentences use the same words but change the order. In so doing, the picture that each sentence draws is different. In the first, the boy performs the action of loving upon the girl by virtue of the fact that “the boy” precedes the verb “loves”, making him the subject of the verb, while “the girl” follows the verb, making her the direct object of the verb. In the second sentence, however, when we swap “boy” and “girl”, suddenly it’s the girl who performs the action of loving, since she comes before the verb, and it’s the boy who receives the action of loving, since he comes after. The word order of the sentence helps us understand which noun serves as the subject of the verb and which serves as the object of the verb.
However, although word order does exist in Latin (and we’ll discuss its rules throughout the semester), for the most part, we do not rely on word order in Latin to help us understand how words function. We can engage in such shenanigans as placing the subject after the verb and the direct object before it if we wanted to emphasize the subject or object in different ways. We could even begin the sentence with the verb and shuffle the subject and object afterward. Such shuffling would render English sentences difficult to understand, if not entirely nonsensical or ungrammatical:
- Loves the boy the girl. (Wut?)
- The girl the boy loves. (Who’s the subject? Who’s the object?)
Note, though, how the same Latin sentence can be written in multiple word orders with no difference in the core meaning of the sentence:
- puer amat puellam. (puer = the boy, amat = loves, puellam = the girl)
- puer puellam amat.
- amat puer puellam.
- amat puellam puer.
- puellam amat puer.
- puellam puer amat.
How, then, can Latin get away with not using word order to indicate a word’s function within a sentence?
Inflection
The answer is a concept called inflection. Rather than using word order, Latin will change the endings of words to indicate certain functions or qualities of a word in a sentence. So, we can use those word endings to figure out how a word works with a sentence, rather than word order.
For example, in the Latin example above, notice how the word for “girl”, puellam, ends in the letters -am. This indicates that the noun is in what’s called the accusative case, which we use in Latin to indicate that a noun is a direct object. If we wanted “girl” to serve a different function in the sentence, we would change its ending; for example, if we wanted “girl” to be the subject (in what’s called the nominative case), then it would look like this: puella, with the ending -a.
There are two major kinds of inflection in Latin: conjugation and declension.
Conjugation
Conjugation is the act of changing the endings of a verb to reflect different aspects of that verb, like who performs the action, when the action occurs, and whether the subject performs or receives the verb’s action. When we conjugate a verb, we apply various endings to different forms of a verbal stem to reflect those aspects.
For example, the verb in the examples above, amat, has an ending of -t applied to the stem ama- that indicates that the verb has a 3rd person singular subject, the action of loving happens right now (present tense), the subject performs the action of loving (active voice), and the action of loving is a verifiable fact (indicative mood). If we wanted to indicate that the subject is plural (e.g., “The boys love the girls”), we would need to change the ending to -nt: amant.
Declension
Declension is the act of changing the endings of a noun to indicate how many of the noun there are and what function the noun serves in the sentence (e.g., subject, direct object, possessor, etc.). When we decline a noun, it means that we change its endings to reflect those aspects of the noun.
Declension also refers to the act of changing the endings of an adjective such that it matches the noun that it describes in gender, case, and number or of a pronoun such that it matches the noun that it’s replacing in gender, case, and number.