Declension

 ( Grammatical Cases ) 

Inflected languages have a freer word order than modern English, an analytic language in which word order identifies the subject and object. As an example, even though both of the following sentences consist of the same words, the meaning is different:

• "The dog chased a cat."
• "A cat chased the dog."

Hypothetically speaking, suppose English were a language with a more complex declension system in which cases were formed by adding the suffixes:

- (for Nominative case singular), - (Genitive case), - (Dative case), - (Accusative case), - (Locative case), - (instrumental), - (Vocative case), - (Ablative case)

The first sentence above could be formed with any of the following Word order and would have the same meaning:

• "The dog chased a cat."
• "A cat chased the dog."
• "Chased a cat the dog."

As a more complex example, the sentence:

• Mum, this little boy's dog was chasing a cat down our street!

• A cat was down our street chasing dog this little boy's mum!

But if English were a highly inflected language, like Latin or some Slavic languages such as Croatian, both sentences could mean the same thing. They would both contain five nouns in five different cases: mum – vocative (hey!), dog – nominative (who?), boy – genitive (of whom?), cat – accusative (whom?), street – locative (where?); the adjective little would be in the same case as the noun it modifies ( boy), and the case of the determiner our would agree with the case of the noun it determines ( street).

Using the case suffixes invented for this example, the original sentence would read:

• Mum, this little boy dog was chasing a cat down our street!

And like other inflected languages, the sentence rearranged in the following ways would mean virtually the same thing, but with different expressiveness:

• A cat was down our street chasing dog this little boy, mum!
• Mum, down street our a cat was chasing this little boy dog!

Instead of the locative, the instrumental form of "down our street" could also be used:

• Mum, this little boy dog our street was chasing a cat!
• A cat was, mum, our street chasing dog this little boy
• Our street a cat was chasing dog this little boy, mum!

Different word orders preserving the original meaning are possible in an inflected language, while modern English relies on word order for meaning, with a little flexibility. This is one of the advantages of an inflected language. The English sentences above, when read without the made-up case suffixes, are confusing.

These contrived examples are relatively simple, whereas actual inflected languages have a far more complicated set of declensions, where the suffixes (or prefixes or infixes) change depending on the Noun gender, the quantity of the noun, and other possible factors. This complexity and the possible lengthening of words is one of the disadvantages of inflected languages. Notably, many of these languages lack articles. There may also be irregular nouns where the declensions are unique for each word (like irregular verbs with Verb conjugation). In inflected languages, other parts of speech such as numerals, , Adjective, and articles are also declined.

Consider, for example, the forms of the noun girl. Most speakers pronounce all forms other than the singular plain form ( girl) exactly the same.

!
! Singular
! Plural
     

! Plain

! Possessive

By contrast, a few irregular nouns (like man/men) are slightly more complex in their forms. In this example, all four forms are pronounced distinctly.

!
! Singular
! Plural
     

! Plain

! Possessive

For nouns, in general, gender is not declined in Modern English. There are isolated situations where certain nouns may be modified to reflect gender, though not in a systematic fashion. Loan words from other languages, particularly Latin and the Romance languages, often preserve their gender-specific forms in English, e.g. alumnus (masculine singular) and alumna (feminine singular). Similarly, names borrowed from other languages show comparable distinctions: Andrew and Andrea, Paul and Paula, etc. Additionally, suffixes such as -ess, -ette, and -er are sometimes applied to create 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.

There can be other derivations from nouns that are not considered declensions. For example, the proper noun has the associated descriptive adjective and the demonym . Though these words are clearly related, and are generally considered , they are not specifically treated as forms of the same word, and thus are not declensions.

!
! Singular
! Plural
     

! Subjective

! Objective

! Dependent possessive

! Independent possessive

Whereas nouns do not distinguish between the nominative case and oblique case cases, some pronouns do; that is, they decline to reflect their relationship to a verb or preposition, or grammatical 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 (although it is increasingly common to use who for both).

The one situation where gender is still clearly part of the English language is in the pronouns for the third person singular. Consider the following:

! non-person
! person
     

! Subjective

! Objective

! Dependent possessive

! Independent possessive

The distinguishing of neuter for persons and non-persons is peculiar to English. This has existed since the 14th century.