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Declension is a grammatical change to a word that indicates number, gender, or case. Inflections can also indicate mood and aspect. Different languages have varying forms of inflection. English has two number states and limited gender and case declension. Other languages, such as Hungarian and Japanese, approach declension differently. Latin and Slavic languages have more inflections than English.
The declension of a word indicates an inflection related to number, gender, or case. Declensions can be applied to nouns, pronouns, and adjectives alike. Each form of inflection, including which words are or are not inflected, varies from language to language. Some languages, particularly Romance languages, are highly inflected, while others, such as English, are not.
An inflection is a grammatical change made to a word to gain additional information from it. In addition to the three declension elements, inflections can also indicate mood and aspect. Some languages allow for additional inflections to reveal certainty, evidence, and surprise. Inflected verbs are called conjugations, while inflections made to nouns, pronouns and adjectives are declensions. They are not to be confused with prefixes and suffixes or other additions to words that change their meaning.
The number indicates how many of something there is. English has two number states: single and plural. Such plural inflections tend to follow a normal “+” pattern, turning “cup” into “cups.” There are multiple leading irregularities in Old English dialects such as +en, as used in “children”, or Latin forms, as in the difference between “datum” and “data”.
Other languages approach number declension differently. Hungarian has no plural declension of nouns if the exact number of nouns is known. A unique feature of Hungarian is that the plural declension, when present, adds a vowel +ka to a word. The vowel rhymes with the final vowel of the word. Japanese, on the other hand, has no plurals at all except the plural pronoun ‘tachi’.
English has largely removed gender declension from its language. Although it occurs in some Old English forms, it is now found only in the pronoun such as his/hers and in foreign derived words such as alumni and alumnae. Many names have a feminine version, a masculine version and a natural version. For example there is mare, stallion and horse or actress. This is not always the case, as the actor is a natural version to replace the actor or actress.
The application of case to nouns, adjectives and pronouns is also more limited than in other languages. Adjectives don’t put themselves in cases. Nouns are put only in the possessive, with the addition of an apostrophe or an apostrophe +sa depending on the spelling. English pronouns are inflected with three or four inflections like “I, me, my, mine”.
Languages like Latin and Polish, as well as related languages, are much more inflected than English. Slavic languages, for example, have seven cases such as vocative, accusative and dative. English gets a lot of them by using articles instead. Latin boasts a large number of declensions for all adjectives, nouns and pronouns. Some of these are regular and some are not.
