Declension

Modern English

In Modern English, nouns have distinct singular and plural forms; that is, they decline to reflect their grammatical number; consider the difference between book and books. In addition, a few English pronouns have distinct nominative (also called subjective) and oblique (or objective) forms; that is, they decline to reflect their relationship to a verb or preposition, or case. Consider the difference between he (subjective) and him (objective), as in "He saw it" and "It saw him"; similarly, consider who, which is subjective, and the objective whom. Further, these pronouns and a few others have distinct possessive forms, such as his and whose. By contrast, nouns have no distinct nominative and objective forms, the two being merged into a single plain case. For example, chair does not change form between "the chair is here" (subject) and "I saw the chair" (direct object). Possession is shown by the clitic -'s attached to a possessive noun phrase, rather than by declension of the noun itself.

Gender is at best only weakly grammaticalized in Modern English. While masculine, feminine, and neuter genders are recognized, nouns do not normally decline for gender, though some nouns, especially Latin words and personal names, exist in multiple forms corresponding to different genders: alumnus (masculine singular) and alumna (feminine singular); Andrew and Andrea, Paul and Paula, etc. Suffixes such as -ess, -ette, and -er can also derive overtly gendered versions of nouns, with marking for feminine being much more common than marking for masculine. Many nouns can actually function as members of two genders or even all three, and the gender classes of English nouns are usually determined by their agreement with pronouns, rather than marking on the nouns themselves.

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). Also the demonstrative determiners this and that are declined for number, as these and those. Some adjectives borrowed from other languages are, or can be, declined for gender, at least in writing: blond (male) and blonde (female). 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, although formally, the words that and possibly she correspond to forms of the predecessor of the (se m., þæt n., sēo f.) as it was declined in Old English.

Core examples

The following hypothetical examples illustrate how languages with declension work. If English were a language with declension, one might add a suffix "-by" after the subjects of sentences, and a suffix "-em" after the objects. Sentences would appear as follows:

John-by read an article-em.

My friend-by saw fireworks-em.

The article-by talked about language-em.

A businesswoman-by used her computer-em.

The cellphone-by automatically called the last-number-em.

The above sentences would sound unnatural to English speakers. However, it is common in many other languages—including Russian, Japanese, Basque, and Esperanto—to use affixes (e.g. prefixes, infixes, suffixes) to specify subjects and objects. These languages have a freer word order than English does, because English depends on word order (or, in some cases, inflection) to identify the subject and object:

John reads a book.

A book reads John.

However, in a language that uses "-by" and "-em" to identify subject and object, a sentence's meaning remains the same regardless of how we shuffle the parts. For example, for "The dog chased the cat," one could use:

The dog-by chased the cat-em.

The cat-em chased the dog-by.

The cat-em the dog-by chased.

Chased the cat-em the dog-by.

In such a language, the word order is not important to understand who did what to whom. However, the "-by" and "-em" must be added to all subjects and objects, otherwise confusion will result.

Other possible cases

Now assume that going to/in the direction of takes the suffix "-mo", doing something with an object or person takes the suffix "-wot", and addressing someone by their name takes the suffix "-hey". The following sentences in this theoretical English will demonstrate how this would seem to us if there were declensions.

John-by went home-mo his friend-wot.

My father-by wrote a book-em his computer-wot.

Sarah-hey, would you-by please bring me-mo a whisky-em ice-wot.

Note that these sentences could be written in any order and their meaning would remain unchanged:

Mark-by goes work-mo car-wot.

Car-wot Mark-by goes work-mo.

Work-mo Mark-by goes car-wot.

This word order is not possible in modern English, as there are no cases or declension as are found in some other languages. This means that in English, word order is essential to constructing coherent sentences; otherwise most sentences become confusing.

This theoretical system of declension is relatively simple and is more or less how declension works in languages such as Basque, Bengali, Greek, Hungarian, Japanese, Russian, and Sanskrit. Some of these 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 many other possible factors. Many of these languages also lack articles. There may also be irregular nouns where the declensions are unique for each word. In many languages, articles, demonstratives, and adjectives are also declined. The following example demonstrates such declension in our theoretical English.

Cases applied to adjectives and particles

In the examples above we have made sentences like...

The big man-by saw a big bear-em.

...by putting the "by-" and the "em-" after the noun in each phrase. However, many declined languages—such as Basque and Japanese—do not use articles (for example, "a" or "the") at all. If our theoretical declined version of English had no articles, we would say something like:

Big man-by saw big bear-em.

In some languages, like Russian and Sanskrit, you would not place "by" after a whole phrase or compound term like "big man", and you would not place "-em" after a whole phrase or compound term like "big bear". Instead, you would place "-by" after each component word of the subject term, and "-em" after each component word of the object term, like this:

Big-by man-by saw big-em bear-em.

Furthermore, instead of this...

Our teacher-by taught us-wot how to get to the city-centre-mo.

... you would have this:

Our-by teacher-by taught us-wot how to get to city-mo centre-mo.

Some languages decline many different parts of speech, including adverbs and demonstratives:

This-by elderly-by man-by is buying a-em very-em expensive-em watch-em.

Cases exotic to Indo-European languages

Finally, assume that: an object that contains another object takes the suffix "-boo". If a person/object turns around and goes back to where they came from, they or it takes the suffix "-yoo". If the object belongs to someone who is not present, then it takes the suffix "-foo":

Cellphone-by is box-boo.

Man-by is walking home-yoo.

This-by book-by is Mari-foo.

These might look like the suffixes 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 suffixes like the above three.

Latin

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

homo (nominative and vocative singular) "[the] man" [as a subject] (e.g., homo ibi stat, the man is standing there)

hominem (accusative singular) "[the] man" [as a direct object] (e.g., ad hominem, toward the man, in the sense of argument directed personally; hominem vidi, I saw the man)

hominis (genitive singular) "of [the] man" [as a possessor] (e.g., nomen hominis est Claudius, the man's name is Claudius)

hominī (dative singular) "to or for [the] man" [as an indirect object] (e.g., homini donum dedi, I gave a present to the man; homo homini lupus est, Man is a wolf to man)

homine (ablative singular) "[the] man" (mainly used following many prepositions, and in the ablative absolute construction, or to mean "by", "with" or "from" without a preposition) (e.g. sum altior homine, I am taller than the man)

homines, nominative, vocative and accusative plural

hominum, genitive plural

hominibus, dative and ablative plural

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?)

The locative case is used for specific spatial relationships. It indicates that a locative-case noun is the location of another noun or a verb (e.g., Romulus regnat Romae, Romulus rules in Rome). It is a feature only of certain place-names, especially of cities and towns (e.g. Roma, Tarquinii, Carthago), small islands (e.g. Samos), and the nouns rūs, humus, and domus (in the country, in the earth, at home). The locative case is rare in classic Latin, and it is mostly absorbed in the ablative case. An important feature of the locative-case nouns is that they are not accompanied by a preposition (as the example illustrates).

Many European languages of Indo-European origin have a set of cases which are similar to those of Latin, for example German and other Germanic languages like Icelandic omit the vocative and ablative; classical Greek omitted the ablative and modern Greek also omits the dative; some Slav languages have in addition the instrumental case.

Most of these languages have several declensions, i.e. classes of words with different schemes for determining the case endings. Furthermore, it is notable that in all these languages and declensions it is the exception rather than the rule for there to be a one-to-one correspondence between cases and endings, so that often one has to deduce from the context which case is meant.

Sanskrit

Sanskrit has eight cases: nominative, vocative, accusative, genitive, dative, ablative, locative and instrumental. Some count vocative not as a separate case, despite it having a distinctive ending in the singular, but consider it as a different use of the nominative.

Sanskrit grammatical cases have been analyzed extensively. The grammarian Pāṇini identified seven semantic roles or karaka, which correspond closely to the eight cases:

agent (kartṛ, related to the nominative)

patient (karman, related to the accusative)

means (karaṇa, related to the instrumental)

recipient (sampradāna, related to the dative)

source (apādāna, related to the ablative)

locus (adhikaraṇa, related to the locative)

address (sambodhan, related to the vocative)

For example, consider the following sentence:

"a leaf falls from the tree to the ground"

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.