Talk:Declension

Why declensions?

OK, I admit this might not be popular. I'm an English language speaker who has tried to learn other languages, only to stumble in part over declensions. I hoped to find something in the article about WHY so many languages seem to have so many declensions. Why do so many languages have so many of them? They seem unnecessarily complicated to me, but there must be some advantage to them. There must be at least some theories about that. Maybe practical examples even?

I have an impression too, that the older the language, the more declensions it tends to have. I would have expected older languages to be simpler, yet it seems the opposite. Any idea why?

A related issue is why modern English has mostly done away with them. The article notes that, but doesn't say why.

216.239.82.96 (talk) 06:20, 7 March 2011 (UTC)

I suppose this is probably "original research" but I think the answer is basically that languages do need ways to indicate what function a word serves in a sentence. English gets away without much declension by using word order to indicate a lot of these things.

For example, in English you can say "the boy threw the bone to the dog" or you could say "the dog threw the bone to the boy" or you could say "the bone threw the dog to the boy". The first noun is your subject, the second noun is your direct object of the verb to throw, and the last noun is the indirect object. Since none of these nouns is getting declined in order to tell you which it is (subject or one of the objects), it's mostly the order that tells you, and by switching the order you switch the meaning. (Note that in this case the indirect object also gets that "to" there to give another hint. You could take out the to and switch the order and get the intended meaning, e.g. "The boy threw the dog the bone.")

In a language like Latin the word order doesn't matter at all because each noun will be declined by adding a suffix which tells you what case the word is in, e.g. nominative or dative, which tells you the word's function in the sentence.

Hope that helps. :) -- 98.203.140.232 (talk) 11:13, 15 December 2011 (UTC)

In Latin — and Russian — word order matters not — at least in purely grammitcal terms. It matters a great deal, however, in terms of connotation. — Robert Greer (talk) 16:42, 15 December 2011 (UTC)

Is this always true, even if the case forms are identical? 109.42.176.26 (talk) 09:17, 22 December 2023 (UTC)

It seems to me there is a certain 'dedeclension' (see my comment below regarding terminology) not only as one progresses through time but also from east to west in European languages. As an English speaker myself, I do suspect I (and the original poster) may suffer from a bit of ethnocentricity (assuming 'our language' is the 'most modern'), but nevertheless, I note that in Germanic languages there is more declension in German than in the more western Dutch, English or the (for the most part more westerly) Scandinavian languages (with the exception of Iceland and certain isolated corners of Norway, which can perhaps be attributed to their isolation). There's not much reason to argue modern German is 'more ancient' than English (lots of English terms are actually more 'Germanic' than the equivalent German words, which often have ancient Roman origin from Provincia Germinia). I'm not sure whether Russian has more declension than more westerly slavic languages, but as they are all eastern it's another example of declension in the easterly direction. Even in Romance languages - almost all have all but dropped declension except in Romanian, which I understand maintains an almost Latin declination structure (and it's hard to argue a huge country like Romania is 'isolated'). Another exception, however, seem to be the Celtic languages - they seem to have retained declension as well, regardless of how westerly they are spoken (I'm not aware, for instance, that Irish Gaelic has less declension than Welsh or Breton), but perhaps it's fair to class these languages under 'archaic' languages (with apologies to modern speakers, most of them speak fluent English as well) Douglaswilliamsmith (talk) 10:25, 30 March 2017 (UTC)

As I've come to know it, at least in ancient Greek, declensions were born from the gluing of certain affixes to nouns, similar to Japanese subject, object, indirect object etc particles. Then, these affixes became case endings when they were normalised, and in the nominative case, as in the initial most-used one that is used for subjects, there were a series of phonological changes that merged the case ending with the root of the noun. Ancient Greek was a polysynthetic language, with many prepositions, compound words that were sometimes comically multiple lines long, and so small pieces of a word that initially were separate from it became their affixes. This is something that Japanese is undergoing today. But because in Greek this happened thousands of years ago, the endings are no longer as canonical and nobody feels that the case ending serves as enough of an indicator for it's function. Case endings have merged, the Dative case has eclipsed, and word order is systemically becoming more and more important. So, Greek is coming full circle, from fully separate words with postpositions indicating function, to the postpositions becoming suffixes, then those suffixes becoming more and more ambiguous to the point were some are dropped out of use and others are syncretized, they become the same with one another, so word order and other prepositions now are again becoming more important for function. It seems to be a reccuring cycle that happens after a long time with various languages, it's just that Greek has been recorded for long enough a period to tell while others not so much. Small words combine into larger ones, which make for freer word order. The words are then slowly shortened for easier use, thus their functions become more ambiguous and word order + other small words come into play again. Again,this is only how I've understood it. I'm not a linguist, but I hope I could at least give you an idea. Cases don't necessarily have to be postpositions, the can also come before the nouns, pre-positions. So I could surely see English coming back to a case system eventually, especially if a subject-object indicator comes in use again. LightningLighting (talk) 12:32, 23 December 2020 (UTC)

Declension vs. Declension Classes

"Declension class" redirects here. IMHO, it shouldn't. The discussion of declension in this article is almost entirely about declensions-as-paradigms, and says very little about declension classes. In fact there doesn't seem to be a Wikipedia article on inflection classes (which could cover declension classes and paradigm classes, both of which could redirect there). Shouldn't there be? Mcswell (talk) 21:59, 13 February 2016 (UTC) (a card-carrying morphologist)

Basic declension theory

I found the section Basic declension theory very easy to understand. Good job User:Shabidoo who appears to be the major contributor. JeepdaySock (AKA, Jeepday) 11:56, 19 February 2013 (UTC)

However, for highly ungrammatical minds (such as mine), the examples given in the theory section made little impact. I strongly suggest that a follow on set of real English examples be given; -tee and -woo do not properly convey the usage of declension beyond an abstract hypothetical sense, at least to me. Please, someone, provide a set of real English examples. Best: HarryZilber (talk) 16:45, 16 March 2013 (UTC)

There is no declension in English. If one really wanted to insist, they could say there is a genitive inflection and a plural inflection, but this only makes grammar more complicated than it already is...and for no good reason .English simply doesn't have noun declension This table shows what declension in English might look like if nouns were declined. Check out a Polish declination table or Icelandic or Arabic one, and you'll discover what a joy (or nightmare depending on the person) such declension is. It is far far more complicated and irregular than this simple example. --Shabidoo | Talk 01:39, 23 May 2013 (UTC)

You guys should think about the ways a future English (or, in fact, an English-based creole language, which may already have done this) could develop case marking through grammaticalisation. For example, it might generalise he and him as markers of nominative and accusative respectively (dropping the h would be convenient, but make the examples less recognisable). A comitative and instrumental could be created by harnessing a noun such as bud(dy) or a verb like take or use into the function of a case marker. Or by using existing pronouns as (postponed) case markers, or even terms such as with him. A vocative is plausibly created by appending hey. Voilà, lots of new cases. Be more creative! This way, you could convey a more natural, intuitive feel than with the mostly arbitrary syllables employed right now. --Florian Blaschke (talk) 02:09, 5 January 2014 (UTC)

There's an additional possibility, namely mimicking the abbreviations you'll usually find in interlinear glosses: -nom, -ack, -ins, -com, -all, -vock, -lock. This would be another way that might help the reader remember the meanings of the endings more easily. (Of course, this would work better as an in-joke among linguists and conlangers, because they are already well familiar with the concepts and abbreviations ...) --Florian Blaschke (talk) 22:11, 5 January 2014 (UTC)

But in October, 72.38.199.34 (talk · contribs · WHOIS) ended up blanking the whole section without leaving an edit summary. Was this warranted? --Damian Yerrick (talk) 19:40, 16 March 2015 (UTC)

No. It should not have been blanked unless there is a consensus on the issue. Shabidoo | Talk 18:27, 17 March 2015 (UTC)

I personally find the use of pretend words for case endings kind of weird. Would it make the section less understandable if we changed the pretend words to the typical glossing abbreviations for the cases, NOM, ACC, etc.? This would result in stuff like the following:

• John-NOM read an article-ACC.
• My father-NOM wrote a book-ACC his computer-INS.
• Stop talking John-VOC!

Using glossing abbreviations would, in my opinion, be less OR than using the made-up words, because I'm not sure if linguistics books actually use pretend words in this way, but they do use glossing abbreviations. We could also choose a declined language, like Russian or Finnish, and use real examples with glosses. — Eru·tuon 19:58, 23 March 2015 (UTC)

I think the use of pretend suffixes adds a creative element that allows readers the possibility to get a more natural 'feel' for how declension 'sounds' to mother tongue speakers. Using the glossing abbreviations will make people think 'oh, this is something for linguists that I am not intended to understand' - the same applies to actually using foreign languages as 'real' examples - the foreignness of the language will again distract people interested in understanding just the concept of declension.Douglaswilliamsmith (talk) 10:37, 30 March 2017 (UTC)

The only question that needs answering here is "Is a fictional/hypothetical example encyclopedic?", specifically, does it meet Wikipedia's quality guidelines?

1. Is it original research? Yes, it's not found elsewhere.
2. Does it violate the neutral point of view policy? No, I don't believe it does, although that could be argued.
3. Is it unverifiable? Yes, because it's made up.

I'd say that violating two of Wikipedia's three core content policies is sufficient for removal. While it may be instructive for some people, it doesn't belong on Wikipedia. I am in favour of Erutuon's suggestion to use a real language or languages with a gloss into English, as is already used on many other pages. Danielklein (talk) 20:12, 27 December 2017 (UTC)

Wikipedia's NPOV policy is a non-negotiable principle. Just because there may be no unbiased way to present the certain technical fictions (however non substantive bias is here), substance (or anything else) is not allowed to supersede neutrality. This Wikipedia page should go. I, being a 'some people' (and an anthropologist), thoroughly enjoyed this material. Having never come across anything like it before, I would sorely miss its inclusion somewhere in Wikimedia; But it SHOULD go! Mouselb (talk) 12:05, 14 January 2018 (UTC)

I am going to remove the whole section. We can't wait indefinitely for the original author to come back and participate. If someone wants to rewrite it while following Wikipedia's guidelines, they can retrieve it from the history. The same is true if someone wants to put it unchanged on their own site. The only reason it's being removed is because it doesn't belong on Wikipedia. Danielklein (talk) 10:01, 11 February 2018 (UTC)

I knew eventually one day someone would come and ruin it for all of us who have worked on it an readers who could finally make sense of an otherwise very confusing article. You mention a couple times that you'd hate to see it go and yet you apply two of the pillars with a questionable interpretation and are forgetting an extremely important rule in wikipedia: the implementation of the 5th pillar. Ignore all rules, the default use of the 5th pillar. When a broad and questionable application of other pillars (two of them in this case) gets in the way of reasonable content...ignore them. Removing it is a bad decision. Shabidoo | Talk 01:08, 12 February 2018 (UTC)

Nobody ever said it violated NPOV Mouselb; the argument was that it may violate NOR and <whatever the verifiability abbreviation is>. As Shabidoo said, it was useful. Violating NOR and <I should just look it up> was maybe enough to remove it (it wasn't really original research since it was presumably derived from the content of the article, but it was certainly too complicated to fall under any exception such as "routine calculations"). However, Shabidoo raises an important point citing Ignore all rules. Hppavilion1 (talk) 10:15, 12 April 2021 (UTC)

word order examples

In my opinion, the following three examples do not illustrate the point of using declension properly:

Mark-tee goes to work-ak by car-ash. By car-ash Mark-tee goes to work-ak. To work-ak Mark-tee goes by car-ash.

I believe that any English speaker would understand "By car Mark goes to work" as well as "To work Mark goes by car", as the prepositions give all the clues. However, "Car Mark goes work" and "Work Mark goes car" would not make much sense. This is where declension comes in:

Mark-tee goes work-ak car-ash. Car-ash Mark-tee goes work-ak. Work-ak Mark-tee goes car-ash. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Ponor (talk • contribs) 12:09, 21 May 2013 (UTC)

Yes...you are absolutely right. Good call --Shabidoo | Talk 01:40, 23 May 2013 (UTC)

Cases exotic to Indo-European languages

The article invents three examples to illustrate "cases exotic to Indo-European languages" however I feel that each one of these appropriately matches a case found Indo-European in at least one Indo-European language. Quote (emphasis is mine):

Finally, assume that: an object that another object is located on top of takes the prefix anta-, the object a person is moving away from takes the suffix waif-, and a person mentioned who is being ordered to do something takes the prefix yoo-.

• The by-food is anta-plate.
  
• The by-man is walking waif-car.
  
• Stop talking yoo-John!
  

These might look like the prefixes in earlier sections, but the big difference is that the earlier ones are related to the cases found in Indo-European languages, while no Indo-European language has any prefix or suffix even remotely related to these three.

In the first example "anta-plate" seems to be similar to the locative case (although I admit it's more specific), in the second example "waif-car" is equivalent to the ablative case, and in the third example "yoo-John" is equivalent to the Vocative case. All three are found in Sanskrit which is an Indo-European language. — Biocrite (talk) 08:18, 4 February 2016 (UTC) Thanks for the input. SOE user changed the suffixes to prefixes. Something that is questionable to say the least. As for these three cases they are quite specific and are casesthat contrast with similar ones. In Hungarian there are cases for going to a place vs going/coming from sewhere. In some oceanic languages there are cases for objects being/taken-from/placed IN objects, on objects and/or above. These are distinctions no indoeuropean case makes. Having said that we could do a better job coming up with Mich more exotic cases (especial ergative cases). I can't get more specific here as I'm badly typing with my mobile but please feel free to suggest some. This weekend I'll change the prefixes to suffixes again. In this format they just appear like prepositions (even clitocs) in contractions with the nouns and represent how declensions work in few languages andvery few indoeuropean ones

Shabidoo | Talk 01:52, 11 February 2016 (UTC)

I've changes the three examples to cases rather different from indo-european ones. Let me know if they are sufficiently exotic. Shabidoo | Talk 19:14, 14 February 2016 (UTC)

I'm not seeing [dubious]. 'Exotic to Indo-European' vs. 'no Indo-European' vs. 'few Indo-European'--please elaborate. Mouselb (talk) 21:22, 14 January 2018 (UTC)

Antonym for Declension?

I came on this article hoping it would use a word for the 'opposite' of 'declension' (or at least the 'alternative' to declension among the languages I know of).

Being fluent in German and English, I am sensitive to the difference between the identification of case by inflection (in German) or word order (in English); however, I can refer to German as a language with 'declension' while I find myself forced to say English is a language with 'case indicated primarily through word order*' , which seems to be an unnecessarily long-winded way of saying it, considering there's such a concise word for the alternative.

• though there are inflections such as 'who/whom', 'he/him' etc, which I say are examples of 'English declension' Douglaswilliamsmith (talk) 10:46, 30 March 2017 (UTC)

I'm not aware of any indo European language which completely lacks declension (though there are languages which show as minimal declesion as English like Afrikaans and Persian). English does have vestiges of declension like all indo-European languages, though in the case of English it is limited to pronouns and a handful of expressions. That being said, there are almost no minimal pairs per English pronouns. That is, there are almost no sentences where if you switched the subject pronoun with the object pronoun it would be a valid sentence with a different meaning.

I see them

• Me see they

No minimal pairs neither per subject or object, a native speaker will know this was a mistake made by the author. There is absolutely no change in meaning...just errors. As for whom, "who and whom" have merged in colloquial English and in any case minimal pairs would be super specific (and easily avoidable). There may be some misunderstanding if the posessive pronouns are used incorrectly, though again it's likely to be identified as an error.

So yes you are completely correct, there are vestiges of declension which can be entirely shown on half a page of a small book as is the case with English's extremely minimal set of conjugations and the extremely minimal use of the subjunctive which can actually be ignored and often is. Perhaps these will all disappear in the next century.

As for an antonym: "language with no declension" is the only one I know. Shabidoo | Talk 15:16, 31 March 2017 (UTC)

You can use the word undeclined to refer to a word (or language) that lacks any declensions. I would be a tad careful in applying that to English since English does have a little bit of inflection even in the nouns (e.g. man, men, man's, men's). What you are more getting at, though, is that English conveys syntactical meaning more by word order than by inflection. Seems like most sources I read use the phrase "word order" to refer to that idea. I have not seen a fancier term for this concept. -- MC — Preceding unsigned comment added by 141.131.2.3 (talk) 15:31, 14 September 2017 (UTC)

Was poking around and found some terminology that might be useful. Languages are called synthetic if they make use of inflections and are called analytic if they rely on word order, helper words, or similar non-inflectional mechanisms. This does not explicitly distinguish noun versus verb inflection, of course. -- MC — Preceding unsigned comment added by 141.131.2.3 (talk) 16:32, 14 September 2017 (UTC)

Probably the reason there's no real "antonym" (or even a converse property or whatever one might call it) is that declension is done to a word, not to a sentence. The usual action in modern English that corresponds to "declension" is merely "to put" (i.e. "put this word first", etc). It sounds too boring.  :) TooManyFingers (talk) 20:48, 24 September 2022 (UTC)

Cases were defined in the Hellenistic Kingdoms

Ptolemaic Egypt, a nation that was born from the remnants of Alexander the Great's empire, and it was a Hellenistic/Greekified Kingdom of Egypt. It is there, more specifically in Alexandria, that Greek and Latin Grammar (and later generalized for other grammars) rules were explored and determined, and cases as a concept were born there. Shouldn't that be mentioned? LightningLighting (talk) 12:18, 23 December 2020 (UTC)

English nouns that come from Latin and Greek

Some nouns, like phenomenon from Greek or cactus from Latin form their plurals as in the original languages, so phenomenon becomes phenomena and cactus becomes cacti, abiding by both languages' 2nd declension types. LightningLighting (talk) 12:39, 23 December 2020 (UTC)

Declension in specific languages

Can someone add a link to declension in the Albanian language? It is an Indo-European language that prominently features declensions, and since it does not fit into any of the major branches (Germanic, Latin, Slavic etc), it is appropriate I think that it should be added to the list. The topic in covered in the article titled 'Albanian morphology'. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 205.189.94.9 (talk) 15:30, 1 March 2021 (UTC)

Done! Ponor (talk) 16:01, 1 March 2021 (UTC)

Possible original research

The "Examples" section possibly contains original research, as it reminds me very much of the "Basic declension theory" section that was removed in February 2018.Shāntián Tàiláng (talk) 16:13, 22 September 2021 (UTC)

It's called "Examples" now for a good reason: it does not pretend to be a theory. Wikipedia is full of example sections (see Hamiltonian mechanics, Quantum mechanics, Regular expression, Watt...) where general rules have been worked out with few to zero sources. Some projects encourage adding those because they help understand the subject better than anything else.

The "Examples" section here states the facts that there are different cases of words in a sentence by calling them -no (short of nominative case), -ge (genitive case) etc. This source does the same: "Cat+(object ending) ate dog+(subject ending)" → "Cat-ac ate dog-no" for (object ending) equals (accusative ending), and (subject ending) equals (nominative ending). No original research here, just a slightly different example with 1:1 correspondence.

Instead of saying "reminds me of some old section that was removed", please tell me what do you think is original research here and I'll add more sources.

I did not want to use glosses (usually perfectly acceptable as examples) to show Croatian:English 1:1 literal translation because non-English sentences would not mean much to the readers of this wiki. I did include the original Croatian language sentences in the page source. Ponor (talk) 04:56, 23 September 2021 (UTC)

"Original research" is not the same thing as "presenting known facts in a different way". It seems to me that what's there now is just well-known facts, presented in a helpful and clever way. TooManyFingers (talk) 21:06, 24 September 2022 (UTC)

The "English explanation" section seems wrong.

The two starting statements are said to have a different meaning (and they do) : "The dog chased a cat." / "A cat chased the dog."

However, by adding the declension suffixes, they now seem to have the SAME meaning: "The dogno chased a catac." = "A catac chased the dogno." [i.e., A catac is what the dogno chased.] To keep with the original different meaning comparison, it should be "A catno chased the dogac."

Also, the "or" with a different word structure seems out of place. -- 188.25.164.236 (talk) 16:47, 18 April 2022 (UTC)

Please look at this paragraph very, very carefully

""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 articles 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.""

Having a brief explanation on Latin, okay.

Ignoring all of the actual declensions in the English language to focus on a Croatian-English constructed language, is an insult.

Simply put the beginning paragraph of each declension and case, as they apply to English, as they are explained in their Wikipedia pages.

As it stands this page is clearly one of the most vandalised pages on Wikipedia. It reads like babble, and ignores the main points.

I love you Wikipedia editors, I really value your hard work, please don't let vandals ruin the most basic concept of having an accessible educational tool freely at our community's disposal. 49.185.137.168 (talk) 17:34, 15 May 2022 (UTC)

The page is called "Declension" (which means "all types of declension in every language"). The page isn't called "English grammar". English speakers are allowed to learn how declension works, in general, without focusing on English.

I agree this would be out of place on a page called "English grammar", but that isn't where we are. TooManyFingers (talk) 21:11, 24 September 2022 (UTC)

(The MAIN points of declension, in English, are "don't bother" and "forget it", making it a less-than-ideal example.) TooManyFingers (talk) 21:22, 24 September 2022 (UTC)

Incomplete & Misleading

"The singular they still uses plural verb forms, reflecting its origins." Yes, and the same can be said for singular "you".

While this section does link to an article focused on the topic of singular they, the above comment is phrased in a way which gives the impression that this pronoun is unique in this regard.

In terms of historical precedent relating to singular subjects, "they" has a considerably stronger resume than "you", quite frankly. The section glossing over this feels like a fumble at best & biased omission at worst.

(user: Zephyrump, who is too tired to find his other device & comment from his account directly) 24.61.145.225 (talk) 09:21, 26 September 2023 (UTC)

declension important in Bantu?

Swahili is specifically mentioned. Now, I studied Swahili only briefly and long ago, but I do not recall any declension at all. —Tamfang (talk) 21:21, 14 July 2024 (UTC)