Talk:Inflection

Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment
This article was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment, between 24 August 2020 and 9 December 2020. Further details are available on the course page. Student editor(s): Shahnawaz01. Peer reviewers: LingClassmate.

Above undated message substituted from Template:Dashboard.wikiedu.org assignment by PrimeBOT (talk) 00:30, 17 January 2022 (UTC)

The overworked Romance morpheme
A single morpheme usually carries information about person, number, tense, aspect and mood, and the verb paradigm may be quite complex.

It is not clear what this means. I tried it out on the first morpheme that came to mind: French parle. It didn't carry sufficient information about person. First or third? Do you mean that each and every verb morpheme carries all that information? Of course not, that is absurd. What then do you mean and if you cannot say what you mean why are you inflicting this gobbledeygook on us? Where is your reference for this? I was willing to accept the programmer-pseudo-linguisticese for Basque because a reference was included, and, I said to myself, if the gentle reader wants to know what it means he or she as the case may be can study the article and read Wikipedia on Basque, which would or should explain it. Basque speakers don't go around talking about two levels of recursion in their agglutination. I could see how language programmers might see it that way although you could argue their view is unbalanced (or they are unbalanced, whatever). But, this Romance material has no ref and makes no sense from anyone's point of view, so out with it.Dave (talk) 02:17, 27 October 2009 (UTC)


 * That was talking about inflectional morphemes whereas "parle" is a root. &mdash; 88.238.45.159 (talk) 20:16, 25 June 2011 (UTC)

Introduction to long?
Why "may" the introduction "be too long" and what or how should it be trimmed? Hyacinth (talk) 09:43, 21 March 2010 (UTC)


 * The introduction doesn't clarify, to me, what inflection is, and is too verbose. It also uses the term in the definition too frequently. Cheers! (Eidlyn (talk) 22:13, 6 June 2011 (UTC))

Why Is Old Irish not mentioned at all?
Old Irish is an extremely highly inflected ancient Indo-European language, yet the article not only lacks a section on it (or any of the other Celtic languages for that matter), but doesn't even mention it or any of its modern, living decedents (Irish Gaelic, Scottish Gaelic and Manx), all of which are inflected (albeit to a lesser degree than Old Irish). This is a serious gap in the Indo-European side of the picture described here. Could someone remedy this? I don't have the expertise. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 84.77.111.117 (talk) 19:10, 1 December 2012 (UTC)

Gato/gata
I see this has been discussed before (up the page), but I'm still inclined to share the doubts expressed there. Is gato/gata really inflectional rather than derivational? Are they really the same lexeme? Isn't it like "waiter/waitress" or "drake/duck"? Victor Yus (talk) 14:33, 21 April 2013 (UTC)


 * I wouldn't be surprised to learn there is controversy about this – there's controversy surrounding many things in linguistics, and derivation vs. inflection is often subtle – but gender agreement, at least, is usually treated as inflection. Cnilep (talk) 03:21, 23 September 2016 (UTC)
 * I made this the image I added to the page 27 September, but now I'm not confident whether it's better. What say you? Cnilep (talk) 07:50, 23 September 2016 (UTC)

Inflection of Hakka?
The article claims that in Hakka, the possessive adjectives are formed by inflection (unlike in Mandarin where they are formed by adding the particle 的 after the personal pronoun). However, I'm unable to find any source to back this up, and the official Taiwanese Hakka dictionary on "个" states that this character is equivalent to Mandarin "的". Furthermore, I asked a Hakka who came from Longchuan about how he says "a big car", "a yellow car", "big", "yellow", "car", "my", "your", "his", "I", "you", "he" and in all cases the preposition "个" is employed for genitive and no audible inflection was observed. If however the inflection does exist as a tone sandhi, which I am likely unable to tell, or I totally misunderstand this sentence, then please help adding a citation and clarify the statement. SchwarzKatze (talk) 14:55, 18 May 2014 (UTC)

Surely the Taiwanese dictionary on Hakka would use 個 for 个? They are the trad and simplified forms of the counter word "ge" yes? They would both use 的 for the possesive particle "de" or as it is pronounced in Hakka "da"

That being said I agree there is nothing to back up the existance of inflection in Hakka. I'm waiting to hear back from some linguists I know in Taiwan to double check on this, but I did a quick search myself and found nothing to back this up. I would suggest removing the section until a reference can be found. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 195.169.196.207 (talk) 16:08, 26 January 2015 (UTC)


 * Hakka does have other forms, but only for some possessive pronouns.
 * {| class="wikitable"

! Person/Number ! Subject/Object ! Possessive
 * first singular
 * 𠊎
 * 𠊎个 or 吾 or 吾个
 * second singular
 * 你 (1) (2) (3) (4)
 * 你个 or 若 or 若个
 * third singular
 * 佢
 * 佢个 or 厥 or 厥个
 * }Justinrleung (talk) 01:19, 29 September 2015 (UTC)
 * 佢
 * 佢个 or 厥 or 厥个
 * }Justinrleung (talk) 01:19, 29 September 2015 (UTC)

Inflection vs. derivation
The second paragraph in this section is a long list, was this meant to be a chart or table of some kind? It would also be helpful if the eight English inflectional suffixes were listed, but these may be better listed in the Examples in English section, rather than the Inflection vs. derivation section. Sschuler (talk) 01:21, 1 December 2016 (UTC)


 * I noticed the same list and fixed the formatting Danielklein (talk) 23:28, 18 February 2017 (UTC)

Old English weak nouns
Is the Old English word "ēage" really "ēage" in the singular accusative? This looks like a mistake because "nama" becomes "naman" and "tunge" becomes "tungan". If the weak neuter form is different from the weak masculine and feminine forms, would someone add a brief explanation, otherwise if it's a mistake just fix it? Danielklein (talk) 23:37, 18 February 2017 (UTC)

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Introduction
I think this article has a lot of necessary information, but also some that may deter readers wanting to lear about Inflection because of its length. The intro seems to go on some areas of morphemes that could be simplified to bring more clarity. It would seem helpful to consider pulling some of those long sentences In the intro, and replace them with citations for those who want a more detailed version. This can make it easier to hit all of the topics that are in the article throughout the intro. Bayjanae (talk) 00:18, 15 October 2020 (UTC)

Dà chù.png unreadable on dark background
The image near the top of the article blends into dark backgrounds. In my case, the Wikipedia Android app using dark mode. I assume this is because the PNG has a transparent background.

I'm not sure if there's a wider WikiProject or something similar that addresses these issues, but I personally don't see any issue with adding a white background to the PNG. I assume that the light mode in official Wikipedia "platforms" (web, mobile apps, others?) uses pure white as a background, so they shouldn't notice a difference.

I'm not familiar with Commons, but I imagine that this would have to be uploaded as a separate file unless it was done by the original uploader? I mean, the image is released under CC0 but I don't know what the Commons policies are regarding modifications. The file is used on a handful of other Wikipedias, but I imagine they would benefit the same from this modification to the image. Firvqipo (talk) 09:12, 7 November 2021 (UTC)