Inflection

The term “inflection” is derived from the Latin verb inflecto, inflectere, inflexi, inflexum 3 “to bend”, denoting the changes in the formation of a word, according to its grammatical function.

English typically inflects verbs in:

the third person singular of the present tense (loves),

the past tense and the participle in -ed (both loved),

the participle in -ing (loving), and in contracted forms (I’ll, you’re, can’t, won’t),

nouns in the plural and possessive forms (pigs, pig’s, pigs’),

pronouns in the objective and possessive forms (him, her, whom; his, hers, its, whose),

adjectives in the comparative and superlative (longer, longest).

The most heavily inflected English verb is to be (am, are, is, be, was, were, being, been).

In comparison with the 106 forms which a Latin verb may take, it is interesting to note that Sanskrit typically has over 700 forms for a single verb, classical Greek over 250, Spanish about 50. In practice, the challenge of learning Latin verb-forms is far less daunting than it may seem: just as English uses the same auxiliaries in forming all verbs, so Latin for the most part uses the same terminations for all verbs, and most of the variations for individual verbs will quickly become predictable.

Other than in verbs, inflection perhaps survives in English most clearly with some pronouns. For example:

Who (subject) sees the pig?

Whom (object) does the pig see?

Whose (possessive) pig do you see?

English is said to have only one adjective which inflects to denote gender: a blonde girl has blond hair, but even this distinction is now rarely seen, blonde being the dominant form.

English has moved further away from the inflection-system than has any other IndoEuropean language, while Lithuanian is the most conservative. It might fairly be said that the almost total absence of inflection in modern English is more remarkable than its vital presence in Latin.

It is partly due to the dominant role of inflection that almost all classical Latin words end with one of only ten letters (a, e, i, m, n, o, r, s, t and x). Apart from the 100 or so which end in c, d, l, and u, scarcely a dozen end with any other letter.

Ausonius’ Technopaegnion is a confessedly silly series of poems in which each line ends with a noun which is monosyllabic in its basic form (i.e. lex, rex etc.). The first two lines of the first poem will give an idea of the whole collection: Res hominum fragiles alit et regit et perimit fors,/fors dubia aeternumque labans, quam blanda fovet spes “Fortune nourishes and controls and destroys the fragile affairs of mankind, fortune fickle and forever tottering, which wheedling hope fosters”. (In this first poem, each line starts with the same word as the line before ends, with res recurring as the last word of the last line.)

There are some 160 monosyllabic nouns in Ausonius’ Technopaegnion, with perhaps fewer than a further ten in the language at that time that he does not include. By contrast, English has vast numbers of such words. Even though relatively few monosyllabic English nouns begin with a (or any other vowel), the 160th monosyllabic noun in the OED is bang (in the first of five distinct lemmata for nouns so spelled).

Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address consists of 268 words, 195 of which are monosyllabic, while 53 have 2 syllables, 13 have 3 and 7 have 4 (4 of these quadrisyllabic words being “dedicated”). The first 268 words of Cicero’s first speech against Catiline, perhaps the most famous of all Latin speeches, offers quite different statistics: 59 words are monosyllabic, while 91 have 2 syllables, 70 have 3, 36 have 4, 11 have 5 and 1 has 6. This radical disparity is not coincidental; it reflects a fundamental difference in the way words are constructed in the two languages.

Heavy inflection is not always accompanied by freedom of word-order; modern German is a case in point. Word-order is discussed in detail in Chapter 2.

Rote learning of Latin paradigms may not be particularly enjoyable, but it is not more demanding than, for example, committing scientific data or mathematical formulas to memory, or practising a musical instrument. In any case, approaches to this necessary task have improved somewhat nowadays. In the first chapter of his autobiography, My Early Life, Sir Winston Churchill recounts his earliest experience with Latin, at the age of seven:

We quitted the Headmaster’s parlour and the comfortable private side of the house, and entered the more bleak apartments reserved for the instruction and accommodation of the pupils. I was taken into a Form Room and told to sit at a desk. All the other boys were out of doors, and I was alone with the Form Master. He produced a thin greeny-brown-covered book filled with words in different types of print.

“You have never done any Latin before, have you?” he said.

“No, sir”.

“This is a Latin grammar”. He opened it at a well-thumbed page. “You must learn this”, he said, pointing to a number of words in a frame of lines. “I will come back in half an hour and see what you know”.

Behold me then on a gloomy evening, with an aching heart, seated in front of the First Declension. [Note the idiosyncratically English order in which the cases are laid out.]

What on earth did it mean? Where was the sense of it? It seemed absolute rigmarole to me. However, there was one thing I could always do: I could learn by heart. And I thereupon proceeded, as far as my private sorrows would allow, to memorize the acrostic-looking task which had been set me.

In due course the Master returned.

“Have you learnt it?” he asked.

“I think I can say it, sir”, I replied; and I gabbled it off.

He seemed so satisfied with this that I was emboldened to ask a question.

“What does it mean, sir?”

“It means what it says. Mensa, a table. Mensa is a noun of the First Declension”.

“But”, I repeated, “what does it mean?”

“Mensa means a table”, he answered.

“Then why does mensa also mean O table”, I enquired, “and what does O table mean?”

“Mensa, O table, is the vocative case”, he replied.

“But why O table?” I persisted in genuine curiosity.

“O table, - you would use it in speaking to a table”.

“But I never do”, I blurted out in honest amazement.

“If you are impertinent, you will be punished, and punished, let me tell you, very severely”, was his conclusive rejoinder.

Such was my first introduction to the classics, from which, I am told, many of our cleverest men have derived so much solace and profit.

Traumatic as the experience was, Churchill says, in the second chapter of the same book: “Naturally I am biassed in favour of boys learning English. I would make them all learn English: and then I would let the clever ones learn Latin as an honour, and Greek as a treat. But the only thing I would whip them for would be for not knowing English. I would whip them hard for that”. In her essay “The greatest single defect in my own Latin education”, Dorothy L. Sayers also recalls vividly, but with far less antipathy than Churchill felt, her first acquaintance with the “mysterious formula” of the singular declension of mensa.