INFLECTION is a general name used by grammarians for all those changes that words undergo when placed in relation to one another in a sentence. See DECLENSION, CONJUGATION, GENITIVE. Most Of IIICSC changes Occur in the end syllable or syllables of the word; and with regard to these at least, there is every reason to believe that they were originally separate words joined on to the root.words (see LANGUAGE), and that through the natural processes of phonetic change and decay, the compounds thus formed gradually assumed the forms now known in grammar as cases, numbers, persons, tenses, etc. In some instances the original suffix can be readily recognized, and, by the help of comparative grammar, much has been done in recent times in tracing the more dis guised inflections to their source; so that the greater part may be considered as satisfac torily established. 'Confining our remarks to the Indo-European languages, we may safely assert that the syllables used in forming the cases of nouns and the terminations of verbs are of pronominal origin. Thus, si, ti, as the endings of the three persons of the present singular of the verb, are evidently connected with the personal pronouns tna, tea (sea), ta; and the plurals mac, tas, nil, contain the same with an indication of the plural number. The nominative singular of masculines and feminines, ending in s contains the personal pronoun of the third person, ta (ro, nom. sa, 6); the plural, pisces, x6patte 5, is probably only a corruption of the same pronoun put twice fish that and that), the doubling of the pronominal element expressing symbolically a plurality of the same thing. In the oblique cases we meet with other pronominal elements, which indicate that a certain thing is placed with regard to the predicate in the three fundamental directions of motion—those of whither, where, and whence. The accusative is the exponent of the direction of an action towards some object, and its termination trt, in the plural as (i.e., IA with the plural termination s), is connected with the pronomen ama, yon. I (comp. Lat. is the pronom
inal syllable employed for signifying that an action has arrived at a certain goal, and is continuing there, giving the dative and locative.cases; while the starting from a certain point is indicated by the pronoun of the third person ta, and its equivalent sa (that), corrupted to t and s, the termination of the ablative and genitive cases. The dative and genitive of the plural express the same relations as the singular, though they are less clear as to their origin. If, notwithstanding the identity of terminations, the aggregate of nouns must, by a manifest analogy, be classified into several distinct declensions, this, in most cases, is to be accounted for by the difference of the formation of stems or bases previous to their coming in contact with the affixes. It is natural that the so-called crude forms should undergo a different process of contraction according to the nature of their final vowel. The dative from the crude form lup6, is as much a contrac tion of ittpo-i, as is the dative fini from Consonantie bases, or of the vocalic, those which end in u (v), a vowel of a decided consonantic quality, ve most apt to preserve the inflections in their unaltered form, being less liable to change on the conflict of con gruous or incompatible elements. Accordingly, we find that the third Greek and the third and fourth Latin declensions present a much more normal aspect of the original inflections than the others. This does not preclude the possibility of a peculiar inflection being preserved in one or other declension; for nothing is more certain than that lan guage, at a certain stage of its development, created and applied a great variety of means to the same purpose, and that these became limited only when the rising intellect of the human tribes, and their distribution into larger or smaller political bodies, taught and them to economize their ways of expression.