Declension

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In linguistics, declension is the inflection of nouns, pronouns, adjectives, and articles to indicate number (at least singular vs. plural), case (nominative or subjective, genitive or possessive, etc.), and gender. Declension occurs in a great many of the world's languages, and features very prominently in many European languages, including Old English but is much less prominent in Modern English. In contrast to Old English, at least 80 percent of the vocabulary of Modern English has been borrowed from foreign, mostly non-Germanic languages (especially Latin), whose systems of declension conflicted with those of Old English. The resulting compromises effectively eliminated most forms of inflection in late Middle and Modern English.

Contents

[edit] Modern English

Further information: Old English declension and Old English pronouns

Most Modern English nouns are declined for number, to distinguish singular and plural - goose/geese, book/books, ox/oxen, child/children, medium/media, syllabus/syllabi, alumna/alumnae; but some do not change - deer/deer, sheep/sheep; and a few have dual plurals - fish/fish/fishes, and in British English penny/pennies/pence. Two 'fishes' indicates two types of fish (e.g., salmon and cod) while two 'fish' is just a raw number (i.e., may be two of the same fish or two different fish). Likewise, two 'pennies' indicates two coins, whereas two 'pence' indicates a two-penny value (i.e., one coin valued at two pence, five pence, etc., or two pennies, five pennies, etc.)[1] Ultimately, 'pence' is a phonetic contraction - 'pennies' compressed from two to one syllable (viz., pennies > penns > pence), with "two pence" and "three pence" further compressed to "tuppence" and "thruppence" (or "tuppenny coin" and "thruppenny coin"). Words borrowed from Latin typically form their plurals in English as they do in Latin - thus, datum > data (not 'datums'), syllabus > syllabi, alumna > alumnae. By default, they also display the same gender in English as they do in Latin (datum, syllabus and alumna being neuter, masculine and feminine, respectively).

All Modern English nouns are still inflected for the genitive case, which is usually limited to expressing possession (occasionally, attribution) - Mary/Mary's, lamb/lamb's. Three days of the week still display the genitive case in ancient form without the apostrophe, which indicates omission of the letter 'e' - Tuesday, not Tu's Day; Wednesday, not Weden's Day (the second 'e' having been lost by orthographic contraction); and Thursday, not Thur's Day (though the 'e' is missing, so it's arguably half-way to the apostrophe).

Many Modern English nouns are inflected for gender, but these are almost invariably words borrowed from other languages, especially Latin words and most personal names: Alumnus (male, singular)/Alumna (female, singular), Alumni (male, plural), Alumnae (female, plural); Marc/Marcia, John/Johanna, Andrew/Andrea, Peter/Petra, Paul/Paula, George/Georgia, Carl/Carole, Gerald/Geraldine, William/Williametta, Anthony/Antonia, etc.

On the whole, however, Modern English continues to use the same system of natural gender that was characteristic of Old English (but with four genders instead of three), so distinctive declension for gender has only really been visible in words borrowed from foreign languages (such as alumnus/alumna). Otherwise, in natural gender, things which have an actual masculine or feminine gender, are classified as masculine or feminine. In Old English, everything that was neither male nor female was neuter, except for things that could be identified abstractly with men or, more frequently, with women (such as ships and countries, which are still regarded as feminine in Modern English, too). In Modern English, things that are neither male nor female are neuter; but they are distinguished from things that can be either male or female, which are classified as common gender. Thus, "stallion" is masculine; "mare" is feminine; and "horse", which might indicate either a male or female animal, is common; while the scientific name, "equus ferus caballus", being inherently neither male nor female, is neuter. But none of these words is in any way an inflected form of the other three. That is, they are four completely distinct words, whereas, to use a faux example, "horsi", "horsa", "horse", and "horsu" might be masculine, feminine, common, and neuter inflections of a shared basic root word, "hors".

Six pronouns still display a distinct dative-accusative inflection (the dative distinguished from the accusative by use of an express or implied preposition): I/My-Mine/Me; Thou/Thy-Thine/Thee; He/His/Him, We/Our-Ours/Us, They/Their-Theirs/Them, and Who/Whose/Whom. Otherwise, the declension of pronouns is uneven, with declension for number usual and declension for gender unusual.

Adjectives are rarely declined for any purpose. They can be declined for number when they are used as substitutes for nouns (as in, "I'll take the reds", meaning "I'll take the red ones" or as shorthand for "I'll take the red wines", for example). Some nouns borrowed from other languages are or can be declined for gender, such as 'blond' (male) and 'blonde' (female); or a 'bonie' lad as compared to a 'bonnie' lass. Adjectives are not declined for case in Modern English, though they were in Old English.

The article is never regarded as declined in Modern English, though, technically, the words this, that and their plural forms, these and those, are modern forms of the as it was declined in Old English. Certain non-standard regional and economic class-associated dialects do decline the article, either in regular speech or in slang - as in such expressions as "How do you like them apples?" and "Oh, them are nice!" (instead of "those").

English once had a much richer system of declension. For more information, see Old English declension and Old English morphology.

[edit] Latin

Further information: Latin declension

An example of a Latin noun declension is given below, using the singular forms of the word homo (man), which belongs to Latin's third declension.

There are two further noun cases in Latin, the vocative and the locative. The vocative case indicates that a person or thing is being addressed (e.g., O Tite, cur ancillam pugnas? O Titus, why do you fight the slave girl?). Though widely used, it differs in form from the nominative only in the masculine singular of the second declension (that is, never in the plural, never in the feminine or neuter, and never in any declension other than the second). The locative case is rare in Latin.

[edit] Sanskrit

Grammatical case was analyzed extensively in Sanskrit. The grammarian Pāṇini identified six semantic roles or karaka, which are related to the seven Sanskrit cases (nominative, accusative, instrumental, dative, ablative, genitive, and locative),[2] but not in a one-to-one way. The six karaka are:[3]

For example, consider the following sentence:

vrikśh[at] parṇ[am] bhūm[au] patati
[from] the tree a leaf [to] the ground falls
"a leaf falls from the tree to the ground"

Here leaf is the agent, tree is the source, and ground is the locus, the corresponding declensions are reflected in the morphemes -am -at and -au respectively.

[edit] See also

[edit] Declension in specific languages

[edit] Latin and Greek

[edit] Related topics

[edit] References

  1. ^ In the United States, and certain other countries, "cents" is used instead of "pence."
  2. ^ Amba Kulkarni and Peter Scharf (eds), Sanskrit Computational Linguistics: First and Second International Symposia Rocquencourt, France, October 29-31, 2007 and Providence, RI, USA, May 15-17, 2008, Revised Selected Papers, Volume 5402 of Lecture notes in artificial intelligence, Springer, 2009, ISBN 3642001548, pp. 64–68.
  3. ^ Pieter Cornelis Verhagen, Handbook of oriental studies: India. A history of Sanskrit grammatical literature in Tibet, Volume 2, BRILL, 2001, ISBN 9004118829, p. 281.

[edit] External links

Look up declension in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.
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