INFLEXION (Latin, inflexio, a bending), that process in grammar which modifies words when placed in relation to other words in a sentence; the act or process of varying the form of words, as by altering the endings or suffixes, so as to express grammatical relation ship. It was primarily called bending, evidently because the word was bent to a new shade of meaning. It includes both declining and con jugation, and it is interesting to note that de clining also carries out this same idea of bend ing down the word. In the grammatical term "case,* from the Latin cado, to fall, there is also the same idea of falling away. Hence, it is well to regard inflexion, in grammar, as the allowing of a word to fall away in a different manner to express some relationship. We say love," The loves" °I am loved* and some times ''thou lovest." In each case the funda mental idea of love is the same, but the ending on inflexion is bent to agree and harmonize with the noun. In the case of nouns, pronouns and adjectives, we call this process declension, and this term was once also used for verbs, but has been displaced by conjugation. Nouns and their adjectives should agree in gender, number, person and case. In primitive speech it is obvious that men talked largely by nouns, mainly of one syllable, for the most common things are thus named, viz.: eye, ear, arm, leg; nose, knee, axe, bow, box, tree, hole, sun, moon, etc. Then came longer nouns, as house, elbow, throat, breast, arrow, etc. Then came words of action, the verbs. Qualifying words followed, now known as adjectives and adverbs. Then came joining words, the conjunctions, preposi tions and articles. The next step in the de velopment of language was obviously the show ing of relationship. As expressions of gender, came °he,* °she* and lit"; adding s came to show the plural in most cases; the person, as present or objective, was suggested by °I" and °you"- the case is illustrated by "thou" (nomi natives, °thine* (possessive), and °thee" (objec tive).
To• conjugate means primarily to join in couples or pairs, but it has been extended in meaning °to state the principal parts of a vseb.* Conjugation is a connected process of
giving the entire series of inflexions of a verb, that is, all its forms in person, number, mode, tense and voice. Many conjugations seem tedious and unnecessarily prolix, but other languages may be more difficult in this respect, as Arabic, in which verbs have 15 conjugations, in theory if not always in practice. In English the common auxiliary verbs am, do, have, shall, will, may, can, asserting respectively existence, action, possession, obligation, volition, liberty, power, assume the function of inflexions and are themselves inflected to denote past time. In French the same inflexional law exists, the con nection between the auxiliary and .the root being closer than in English. I have to love, that is, I shall love, is compounded of the infinitive aimer, to love, and ai, I have, the first person present indicative of amis. The same is the case in Italian and Spanish.
Pronominal and predicative roots are com bined to form one word in the Semitic and Aryan tongues, which are therefore called in flexional, a process impossible in monosyllabic languages like the Chinese or in languages of the agglutinate order like those of the Turanian family. The Semitic and Aryan families of languages, which admit of phonetic corruption both in root and the terminations, are called organic or amalgamating languages. The pro nominal termination varies according to the person or number. Thus the Sanskri ms, the endings of the three persons singular of the present of the verb, are perhaps from the per sonalpronouns ma, sva, la and the persons of the plural indicate the plural number by the form of the pronominal affixes. The plural of masculine and feminine Greek and Latin nouns of the third declension is probably a contrac tion of the duplication of sa, the pronoun of the third person. The verbs i, to go, as and fu, to be, supply the inflexions of certain tenses of the verb, there being also a pronominal termination varying according to the person. See GRAM-` MAR.