Declension In Modern English Grammar And The Inflect Language

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English grammar has constantly been changing ever since it existed. One of the changes it has suffered has been the decrease of declension, which consists in marking nouns, adjectives and pronouns to indicate a certain grammatical case, gender and number. Together with the loss of declension, Modern English also lost word order freedom, since a certain order needs to be maintained in sentences in order to make meaning. In Modern English, it is only possible to recognize the subject and the object of a sentence for the position that they are in. It is just the pronouns that still have declension and allow change in word order without affecting the meaning. Modern English also keeps using number declension, but this does not influence on variations…show more content…
This paper is going to focus on declension. The sentences that have declension take cases such as grammatical, nominative, accusative and local, and the amounts of cases vary on each language.

2. Old English declension
Llinàs i Grau and Reeves observe that “Old English was an inflecting language, in which grammatical information about the functions and relationships of words in a sentence was carried by the endings (mainly suffixes but for some prefixes) of the words” (1998, p. 90). The old English declension was the same as those of Latin, Greek, Sanskrit, Gothic, Old Norse, Old Saxon, and Old High German (Moore and Knott, 2007).
Words had to agree on certain aspects, so if a noun was declined in the singular strong masculine form of the nominative case, the determiners, adjectives and pronouns accompanying it also had to be declined that way.
Old English declension had four cases (nominative, genitive, dative and accusative) three genders (masculine, feminine and neuter), three person (first, second and third) and two numbers (singular and plural) (Llinàs i Grau and Reeves,
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