Talk:Inflection/Archive 1

Agglutination
What's with the new agglutination addition? I'm pretty sure that "weak inflection" is different from agglutination; things like the English third-person singular present verb suffix -s is inflection rather than agglutination, because in agglutination one affix has one meaning (so the third person, the singular, and the present would each have their own affixes). Inflection is not limited to stem changes. -Branddobbe, 11:42 PST Wed Nov 26 2003


 * Yeah, you're right Branddobbe, wanna fix the agglutination definition?

aint no stub
By the way I think this ain't no stub no more. Anyone disagree? Steverapaport 14:28, 1 Dec 2004 (UTC)

How is Inflection being confused with Synthesis?

 * (moved question from User_talk:Ish_ishwar)

Hi Ish.

You've been putting lots of flags on Inflection without ever actually discussing the confusion you point out.

If my understanding is correct, an inflected language changes nouns and/or verbs, by either agglutination or fusion, to reflect grammatical functions such as case, tense, mood, etc.

A synthetic language is a term for languages that place more than one morpheme (meaning unit, including grammatical markers), into a single word

By these definitions, all inflected languages are synthetic, though not all synthetic languages need be inflected, right?

So how (other than organizationally) is the Inflection article in need of loving attention? Can you help me make it right?

Best regards, Steverapaport 11:41, 3 Dec 2004 (UTC)


 * Ish ishwar reply:
 * Hi Steverapaport. I was hoping some of the authors would check this out at a library.
 * There are a number of things that I think need to be clarified. I am going to be fairly critical.  The authors can decide that needs to be done.


 * First re: your question:
 * Inflection is not restricted to nouns and verbs--adjectives & other grammatical categories may be inflected.
 * One technical point: agglutinating & fusional refers mostly to the degree of segmentability of morphemes within a word. So, a language that has inflection will use inflectional morphemes.  These words with inflectional morphemes may be described (in theory) as either agglutinating or fusional depending on how easily you can separate the individual morphemes.


 * about the Inflection entry:
 * "inflected language" is not such good a term.
 * Firstly, it is more common to use "inflectional language" instead of "inflected language".
 * Secondly, using the term "inflected language" is not good due a confusion on these web pages between "inflection" and "degree of synthesis". Additionaly, "Inflectional language" has been used synonymously with "fusional language", but I dont recommend this usage.  Comrie (1989: 45) has a nice discussion of this:  "In place of the term fusional, one sometimes finds the term flectional, or even inflectional, used in the same sense.  This is not done in the present work to avoid a potential terminological confusion: both agglutinating and fusional languages, as opposed to isolating languages, have inflections, and it is therefore misleading to use a term based on (in)flection to refer to one only of these two types.  The availability of the alternate term fusional neatly solves the terminological dilemna."
 * So the 1st sentence of the Inflection entry reads: "An Inflection or inflexion is a change of word form according to grammatical function, which occurs in inflected languages." What does the author mean by "inflected languages"?  Fusional languages?  Or a language that uses inflectional morphemes?  If s/he means the latter, then this is partly a circular (and hence redundant) statement.
 * 2nd paragraph. It seems that one could define inflection without recourse to the notion of degree of synthesis (i.e., isolating vs. synthetic langs).  (Some may just want a clarification of what inflection is, but not really want to go into the details of morphological typology.)  With this said, the paragraph is correct: all languages with inflectional morphemes will be synthetic languages.
 * I think it would be good to point out that inflection does not include only affixation (i.e., prefixes, suffixes, infixes, circumfixes) and exclude morphological processes like reduplication & alternation.
 * "on-the-fly"?? Does this feel to you like the author means isolating languages are more methodical  or not as careless in their grammar?  What does this mean?
 * The entry mentions nothing of inflectional morphemes. Inflectional morphemes, in theory, contrast with derivational morphemes.  In short, inflectional = morphemes indicating grammatical info (i.e., case, number, person, grammatical gender/word class, mood, mode, tense, aspect, other relational info); derivational = morphemes that change meaning, i.e., creating a new word from an existing word, sometimes by simply changing grammatical category (noun to verb).  I think that a good discussion of inflection needs to discuss derivation.
 * "declension" & "conjugation" are traditional grammarian terms. An introductory linguistic textbook probably wont even mention them.  But, they are useful to students of European langs.
 * "weak" & "strong". I think that these terms are not so useful.  I believe they are restricted in usage to mostly Indo-European langs, perhaps mostly in historical linguistics & in tradition grammar, especially with Germanic languages (Old English, proto-Germanic) (I have seen these terms referring to PIE, too).  (However, I admit that I dont know so much about the usage of these...).  Maybe these terms can be mentioned in passing.  But, readers should know that these terms are not so widely used out of these contexts.  (Somebody should check this out)
 * "Linguistically, the former is strictly called agglutination, and the latter is the true sense of the word inflection." Wrong.  Affixation does not entail agglutinating morphology, just look most of the languages in Europe.
 * The first part of the entry seems to discuss inflection. The second section "Inflection in various languages" seems to discuss degree of synthesis.  This is the main confusion I mention in #1.2 above & on my note on Synthetic languages entry.  These are two different concepts.  They are related in certain ways, but nonetheless different.  Some books may confuse or fail to clarify them--maybe this is why they are confused in Wikipedia?  Anyway, you can see why Comrie suggests not using "flectional" to mean "fusional".  [I think that somehow the term "inflectional" was mistakenly equated with "synthetic" due to examples of synthesis used in some sources.  Examples of synthesis commonly use Indo-European langs which often have many inflectional suffixes (since it is very easy to get examples of these from any grammar book).  So, because of these examples & also maybe due to confusing terminology mentioned by Comrie (i.e., fusional = flectional), the Wikipedia authors were misled.]
 * Although this information in the second section is useful & good, maybe it better belongs on the Synthetic languages page. Or maybe someone should create a Degree-of-synthesis page?  (maybe not?).
 * Why dont you give your full reference of (Agirre et al, 1992)? I think it would be nice for Basque learners & others interested in these things.  It is a cool fact, maybe somebody wants to check out the source.  So, I suggest making a References subsection.
 * The above is a lot, I know. I think that the writers need to consult an introductory linguistics text.  A good one is
 * Stewart, Thomas W., Jr.; & Vaillette, Nathan. (2001).  Language files: Materials for an introduction to language & linguistics, (8th ed.).  Columbus: Department of Linguistics, The Ohio State University.
 * [But dont get the 9th edition! It has a lot of confusing errors (they changed from Americanist transcription to British IPA).]


 * References:


 * Comrie, Bernard. (1989).  Language universals and linguistic typology, (2nd ed.).  Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.  [Originally published (1981)].
 * Ish ishwar 18:59, 3 Dec 2004 (UTC)

some links
Here are some sites you might want to check out:
 * an entry at encyclopedia.com
 * SIL: What is inflection?
 * SIL: What is an inflectional affix?
 * SIL: What is an inflectional category?
 * SIL: What is an agglutinative language?
 * SIL: What is a fusional language?
 * SIL: What is an isolating language?
 * SIL: What is a polysynthetic language?
 * SIL: What is a morphological process?
 * SIL: What is derivation?
 * SIL: Comparison of inflection and derivation
 * Lexicon of Linguistics [a rather technical (too much so for most, I guess) dictionary/encyclopedia reference]

- Cheers! Ish ishwar 19:31, 3 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Wow
Ok, then, Ish. You've convinced me that even if I (or the other current authors) rewrote the page to clearly include all the distinctions you point out, I would lack the background to be properly clear.

You've already done most of the work in your comment above, and you obviously have the background -- would you kindly consent to improve the page yourself? I promise not to object if you throw away all my work and substitute something clearer and more correct.

Your idea for hyperlinks and references is well taken. I'll put in the Agirre reference when I find it again.

Steve

We who are doomed to fail salute you
Ok Ish, even though you could have done a better job, I've taken up the challenge

Steverapaport 17:23, 5 Dec 2004 (UTC)


 * Hi Steve -
 * So, I finally got around to this. I am not finished, but it is a start.  Please improve it in any way you see fit. - Ish ishwar 11:39, 2004 Dec 22 (UTC)


 * I like it a lot, Ish.  Glad you came in and did the necessary work.  Now that you've added the sections it cries out for more content, but it's past my level of expertise.   I'm just cleaning up little bits now, hope you or Mark Dingemanse or someone else comes in and adds more to the anemic sections.
 * Best, Steverapaport 00:11, 24 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Latin and Other Romance Languages
The bit about Latin and ablaut / umlaut is a bit confusing. The text here notes:


 * There is no Ablaut or Umlaut, and only little predictable vowel alternation, found on certain verbs where the Latin root had the phonemes /E/ or /O/.

But then when I go look at the ablaut page, I find this:


 * Latin displays ablaut in verbs such as ago (present tense), "I drive"; egi, (perfect tense), "I drove".

So which comment is correct? --- Eirikr 07:51, 6 Apr 2005 (UTC)


 * I've corrected that. The comment on "no Ablaut" belongs on the previous paragraph on Romance languages (which to my knowledge don't have Ablaut, or at least not a strong pattern of Ablaut inflection). Seems the Latin paragraph was added later (in the wrong place). My question would be: are some of the "irregular" vowel alternations found in Romance languages actually Ablaut carried over from Latin, or diachronical phonologically-conditioned changes of Latin vowels? I mean things like Spanish decir-digo or tener-tuve or morir-murió, not the e/ie, o/ue alternation. Also, does Romanian (often forgotten in reviews of Romance languages) have Ablaut? --Pablo D. Flores 12:40, 6 Apr 2005 (UTC)


 * Thanks for clearing that up, Pablo. And the new question you bring up is a good one -- the vowel shifts there in Spanish certainly seem like the ablaut talked about in strong verbs, where vowel shifts indicated tense/aspect.  --- Eirikr 06:26, 7 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Japanese
Though a minor point within the scope of the whole article, might we change the wording describing Japanese as "a probable language isolate" to read "a possible language isolate"? For one, Japanese is not listed in the List of language isolates. There is also considerable debate about the relationship between Japanese and other languages, and much of this appears (at least to me) to be more to the extent of how much Japanese is related than whether or not it's related at all. Some of this debate is evident here on Wikipedia, given a look at the Japanese language and Korean language pages, and the Japanese and Korean talk pages.

Also, adjectives exhibit markedly more inflection than nouns. The description of the particles and their use to mark the case of noun phrases is accurate, but the current wording makes it sound like adjectives are as regular and un-inflected as the nouns are, which is simply not the case. Adjectives are inflected for tense ("good": yoi present, yokatta past), to mark an adverbial role (yoi mono "good thing" vs yoku suru "well do -> do (something) well"), and to mark a sort of continuation (sore ga yoi "that is good" as a complete utterance, vs sore ga yokute "that is good...", implying that another phrase is to follow). I'm not sure if it counts as inflection, but adjectives also have a noun form (yosa "goodness"), and in extreme cases, some adjectives exhibit very different forms in polite speech, with yoi changing to yoroshii. Instead of "shows a high degree of inflection on verbs, less so on adjectives and nouns," how about "shows a high degree of inflection on verbs, less so on adjectives, and least on nouns"?

Cheers, Eiríkr Útlendi 00:07, 6 January 2006 (UTC)


 * I've removed the mention of Japanese's being a language isolate, since (1) it's controversial, (2) it's not really relevant -slash- worth getting into, and (3) not all the other languages mentioned give their language families, so it's not like removing that statement suddenly makes the article inconsistent.


 * I also made the change you suggested about showing the gradations of verb inflection > adjective inflection > noun inflection.


 * Some of your examples look to me to suggest something more than just agglutinativity? I mean, does every adjective change -i to -roshii to become polite? (Well, I guess not, since you say "some adjectives" - but that casts doubt on the article's statement that Japanese is "extremely regular.") Please make any changes that you think appropriate in order to make the article more accurate. (Remember to be bold!) :-)


 * Ruakh 06:28, 6 January 2006 (UTC)


 * Thanks, Ruakh. I'm not an expert of much, so I hesitate to be bold in many areas without first talking it over.  :)


 * About Japanese and regularity, the usage of particles is indeed very regular, but the inflection of verbs and adjectives does have some exceptions. I hedged my bets about adjectives and polite forms as the only one I can bring to mind is yoi -> yoroshii, but I'm not a native speaker and there may be others I'm just not aware of.  Verb-wise, the big exceptions are suru "to do", kuru to come, and to some extent iku "to go".  There is also some disagreement even within Japan about what constitutes the proper potential form for the class of verbs ending in ru (the so-called Group 2 verbs), with the ending given as either rareru (identical with the passive) or reru.  But aside from these, inflection is indeed awfully regular, which happily makes that aspect a bit easier to learn :), so I'm fine leaving the "extremely regular" statement as-is.


 * It is polite forms where things get complicated. There is some simple noun alteration for politeness where either an o- or go- is prefixed (with the go- attaching to words of Chinese origin).  I assume this counts too as inflection?  Also, though adjectives again have very few (possibly only the one?) polite forms, verbs undergo more common transformation in polite contexts, with iru "to be" becoming imasu (consistent with usual verb conjugation), but from there changing to gozaimasu when the speaker describes themselves or their group, and irasshaimasu when describing the party spoken to.  Similarly, miru "to see" becomes mimasu, and thence haiken shimasu (compound verb, describing speaker) and goran ni narimasu (also compound, describing audience); there are numerous other examples.  Is this kind of context-dependent wholesale subsititution also described as inflection, or is this something else entirely?


 * Cheers, Eiríkr Útlendi 16:57, 6 January 2006 (UTC)

What about Semitic languages?
Are some of them inflected? Does anyone know? &mdash;The preceding unsigned comment was added by 132.170.49.168 (talk &bull; contribs).


 * Yes, the Semitic languages are inflected. The details vary from language to language, but nouns are generally inflected for definiteness (definite/indefinite/possessed) and number (singular/plural or singular/dual/plural), and sometimes for case (nominative/accusative/possessed); adjectives, to agree with their nouns' definiteness, number, and gender (masculine/feminine); verbs, for tense or aspect (past/present/future or imperfect/perfect) and mood (indicative/jussive/imperative), and to agree with their subjects' gender, number, and person (first/second/third); and pronouns, for gender and number, and in the case of personal pronouns, person and case. I really should re-emphasize, though, that this varies from language to language within the Semitic family, and sometimes it depends whom you ask. Ruakh 04:33, 3 March 2006 (UTC)

Basque is polysynthetic???
I know it's not really relevant, but Basque is NOT a polysynthetic language. I'm going to edit the description of Basque as "an extremmely inflected polysynthetic language" to remove the word "polysynthetic," if noone minds.67.170.176.203 14:25, 10 April 2006 (UTC)


 * It's not incorporating, but it is polysynthetic. Ruakh 16:26, 10 April 2006 (UTC)

Germanic languages vs. Romance languages
On what is based the following comparison between Germanic languages and Romance languages?

"Some branches of Indo-European (e.g. the Slavic languages and the Germanic languages with the exception of English and Afrikaans) seem to have generally retained more inflection than others (e.g. Romance languages)."

I think it's difficult to make a comparison. While noun inflection is much simpler in most Romance languages (which have lost declensions) than in Germanic languages (some of which still have a few active declensions), with verb conjugation it's the other way around: Germanic verbs typically have much less synthetic tenses than Romance verbs. FilipeS 16:06, 22 April 2006 (UTC)

Not to mention that the statement is contradicted a few paragraphs below:

"The Romance languages like Spanish, Italian, French, Romanian etc., are more inflectional than English, especially when it comes to verb forms. A single morpheme usually carries information about person, number, tense, aspect and mood, and the verb paradigm may be considerably complex."

By the way:

"There is no Ablaut or Umlaut, and only little predictable vowel alternation, found on certain verbs where the Latin root had the phonemes /E/ or /O/."

Isn't ablaut just another name for vowel alternation? FilipeS 16:10, 22 April 2006 (UTC)

Newly added image.
Is the newly added image accurate? The masculine/feminine distinction looks to me like derivation rather than inflection. Also, the image technically depicts Catalan inflection, though I guess it happens to be the same in this case. —RuakhTALK 03:47, 3 January 2007 (UTC)


 * According to the definitions in the article, I would say it's inflectional. I like the picture. :-) FilipeS 18:08, 5 January 2007 (UTC)


 * What gives you that impression? The article doesn't give actual definitions so far as I can see, but it gives two loose criteria: first, whether the information it supplies is grammatical in nature, and second, whether a dictionary might list it separately. The sex of a cat doesn't strike me as being a bit of grammatical information (though it does have grammatical consequences, since Catalan has gender agreement for adjectives and determiners, and the nouns gato and gata are of different genders); and I don't know about Catalan dictionaries, but the Real Academía Española does list the nouns gato and gata separately. (Of course, the nouns have the additional complication that the noun gata has other meanings besides just "female cat", but the noun chica has an entry even though it says simply to see the entry for chico, so the RAE obviously does think that in sex-paired nouns, each noun warrants a headword). —RuakhTALK 06:09, 6 January 2007 (UTC)

What gives me that impression? This, for one thing:

"Inflection is the process of adding inflectional morphemes (atomic meaning units) to a word, which may indicate grammatical information (for example, case, number, person, gender or word class, mood, tense, or aspect). Compare with derivational morphemes, which create a new word from an existing word, sometimes by simply changing grammatical category (for example, changing a noun to a verb)." FilipeS 16:25, 6 January 2007 (UTC)


 * Yes, I read that. But — as I said — the difference between the nouns gato and gata is not one of gender; it's one of sex. Eso animal es una gata ("That animal [←masculine] is a female cat") is a perfectly grammatical statement in Spanish. Now, it's true that the nouns do have different genders, one being masculine and one being feminine, but that's a consequence of the main difference between the nouns — the sex of their referents — and of Spanish's tendency to use natural gender. —RuakhTALK 19:32, 6 January 2007 (UTC)

You are making a needless complication with sex and gender, there. They are not totally disjoint things. That's a misconception that people whose native language does not have grammatical gender often have. The two genders are called "masculine" and "feminine" for a reason: the former is where you usually find nouns that designate males, and the latter is where you usually find nouns that refer to females. It's no different from singular vs. plural in grammatical number. Just as "car" and "cars" are two forms of the same lexeme in English, so are "gato", "gata" "gatos" and "gatas" in Spanish or Catalan. FilipeS 19:45, 6 January 2007 (UTC)


 * First of all, I have two native languages, and one of them (Hebrew) does have grammatical gender. I'm not saying that sex and gender are "totally disjoint", but they are slightly different, and this is exactly the context in which that difference is relevant: inflection has to do with grammatical information such as gender, not biological information such as sex. It's like how grammatical number doesn't necessarily have to do with actual real-world number (consider e.g. "many a man has", "more than one man has", etc.), but in the case of gender we have the convenience of having separate words for grammatical gender and natural gender ("sex"). By the way, you seem to be arguing somewhat of a straw man here, as I do accept that grammatical inflection exists; obviously the adjective gato(s)/gata(s) (meaning blue- or green-eyed) is one lexeme in Spanish (and in Catalan, if it exists in Catalan). I just don't believe that nouns are inflected for gender, else we'd have forms like computadoro (Esto objeto es un computadoro). —RuakhTALK 00:33, 7 January 2007 (UTC)

Then I guess nouns aren't inflected for number, either, else we'd have forms like "rices". And I guess verbs aren't conjugated in English, since "may" and "can" have no gerunds.

In my opinion, you are falling prey to a misconception, which is the notion that, if a language has inflection, then every word in it must exist in all possible "versions". That is definitely not the case. In the Romance languages, there are plenty of examples of defective verbs; that is, verbs which only exist in some of their theoretically possible inflectional forms. This happens either for semantic reasons (a particular form does not "make sense"), or for euphonic reasons (that form would sound funny, so a different verb altogether is used insted). But I don't think this means that the different forms of defective verbs are derivational, rather than inflectional. They are simply words whose inflectional scheme is incomplete.

Moreover, describing "gata" as derivational gives the impression that the word "gato" appeared first, and only much later was the feminine version invented, as a sort of afterthought. As a speaker of Portuguese, which is closely related to Spanish, that's not how I perceive "gato" and "gata" at all! The latter is not an "addition" or an "appendix" to the former; they are two versions of essentially the same thing.

"Sex" is a property of living beings, not of abstractions. It's not correct to apply it to nouns. Cats may be male or female, but the words "cat", "gata" and "gato" are neither. "Gata" is a feminine grammatical gender word, not a "female" word, and it is just as feminine grammatical gender as "mesa" or "buena". It is artificial to split the three into two classes on semantic grounds, because grammatical gender isn't primarily a matter of semantics in the first place. FilipeS 18:04, 7 January 2007 (UTC)


 * Pink and blue for female and male cats? Give me a break. It may be fairly illustrative (though a bit too cute to be taken seriously), but there are some unfortunate implications in such a picture. Please try to figure out a solution that is a tad more neutral when it comes to perpetuating traditional gender roles.
 * Peter Isotalo 19:30, 20 February 2007 (UTC)

Accidence
The term accidence redirects to here (inflection), but there's no mention of the term on the page. Is accidence a synonym for inflection? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 69.95.233.136 (talk) 15:38, 14 February 2008 (UTC)

Lemmata in covert inflection
The following assertion has a big problem:
 * The concept of a "word" independent of the different inflections is called a lexeme, and the form of a word that is considered to have no or minimal inflection is called a lemma.

which is not consistent with the fact that lemmata are conceived as being the canonical or citation form of any lexeme or lexical item that is subject to overt inflection. In other words, lexemes that have no overt inflection are overtly invariant and therefore do not need a citation form or lemma. Eklir (talk) 19:47, 29 July 2008 (UTC)

Section on Arabic
The Arabic characters in that section need to be accompanied with Latin character citation forms (IPA or other). Eklir (talk) 20:31, 30 July 2008 (UTC)

Level of comprehensibility of the article
In my opinion, a person who came to this article unfamilar with the topic 'inflection' would have great difficulty in understanding it, whereas a person who brought enough background knowledge to understand the article would not need to read the article.

To put this another way, IMO the article is nowhere near to being appropriate to a general audience.

FWIW, Wanderer57 (talk) 16:06, 2 August 2008 (UTC)

I agree entirely, it needs to be rewritten so that the early sections are understandable to a general audience.

Ehrenkater (talk) 22:38, 20 September 2009 (UTC)
 * I'm afraid it is worse than that. The writing is not linguistically sound either; moreover, the English shows all the earmarks of a writer who is not a fluent English speaker, either because he never attended to those details or because English is not his first language, or both. I'd question and check everything; however, I'm not going to add the templates unless I get refusal to cooperate. This is a case of bad writing hiding under a technical vocabulary.Dave (talk) 12:50, 23 October 2009 (UTC)

Removed inflectional/non-inflectional overt/covert comparison
Removed statement: "Beside conjugation and declension there is comparison with its maximum category number of two ('direction', i. e. more or less, and 'degree', i. e. positive, comparative, superlative, elative etc.). It is a question of definition whether or not comparison is considered a kind of inflection. In covert inflection, such categories are not overtly expressed. "

I have NO idea what this self-contradictory statement might mean. For one thing, more or less are expressed by the comparative degree, so I don't know why direction would be different from intensity. Furthermore, there is no third category, comparison. In some structures in different languages and also within the same language comparison is overt; in others, covert. Where's the uncertainty and the definition? What do you mean definiton? A word is either inflected to express comparison or it is not. It is not a matter of definition. To be honest with you I see this prose as patois expressing nothing and going nowhere. It is time we had some meaningful linguistics articles. Thanks, however, for getting us started. Oh by the way this article has no line-item references and the note you give on this is not one either. As goes the passage, so goes the note, incomprehensible. My justification for removing this is that it is incomprehensible and unreferenced, preventing us from either understanding it or helping you to explain it. You can fight back, rewrite it yourself giving the reference this time. As it stands now this article has no line-item references. The sequence should be, concept, reference, concept, reference, concept, reference, etc. That is the only way we can be sure you are not winging it on your own.Dave (talk) 13:37, 23 October 2009 (UTC)

The cats incomprehensibiliy
"For example, in English cats versus cat, the affix -s expresses overtly an underlying category and, in speech recognition by actual speakers, the noun cat thus marked permits to uncover the grammatical relation in which the noun cat is embedded."

Well, the next time I want to talk about cats I will be sure to uncover the grammatical relation in which they are embedded. I thought the cat was an animal. Thanks for making that clear. Does that mean we can get rid of them by embedding them in something? I think we already said this so I would describe it as trivial, repetitive and incomprehensible because highly convoluted.Dave (talk) 14:32, 23 October 2009 (UTC)

Unsourced generalization not common knowledge
German, which is closely related to English, employs many of these inflectional devices, but the umlaut and ablaut are widespread, while in English they are generally considered as exceptions (except in strong verbs where they are extensively used).

Is that your opinion? Who did the analysis that resulted in that conclusion? Was there any or are you just enlightening us with your own opinion?Dave (talk) 17:10, 23 October 2009 (UTC)

Irrelevant passage
In the past, writers sometimes gave words such as doctor, Negro, dictator, professor, and orator Latin inflections to mark them as feminine, thus forming doctress, Negress, dictatrix, professress, and oratress. These inflected forms were never frequently used, although many English users continue to use Latin endings today in somewhat more common constructions such as actress, waitress, executrix, and dominatrix.

I presume this was of interest to you because it is a method of forming an English feminine. There are a good many such methods, all adopted from other languages. Why pick on this one? Is this an example, or what? This "silver English" of yours is difficult to comprehend. All we need here are some examples, which was already done. I suggest we do not need this. If you strongly disagree, I would ask that you explain it a little as an English feminine, give us a dictionary as a reference, remove professress, as that fails the Internet test, and remove negress, as that is now racially sensitive and we do not need it, ditto for jewess, if you were inclined to use it, as it is culturally sensitive and we want this to be bland and encyclopedic, not a list of hackle-raising shockers. Those words now border on being taboo, as they make distinctions we do not care to emphasize now.Dave (talk) 17:36, 23 October 2009 (UTC)

Confusing passage
as well as agreement with one or more arguments in number, gender, and/or person. (In Celtic languages, some prepositions are also conjugated for person, number and gender.)

Agreement is not a kind of declension. It applied to both declension and conjugation. Why are Celtic prepositions under conjugation? Should that be a third category? A little explanation - 1 sentence - might be in order.Dave (talk) 18:05, 23 October 2009 (UTC)

Table formats
Hello Woodstone, what's happening with the table formats? You put the widths back but you left out all the fine colors! Was that intentional? What are you aiming at here? Maybe we can get together on this, hey? The two differences so far are widths and colors. What about it?Dave (talk) 19:59, 23 October 2009 (UTC)
 * PS No discuss means I put it all back the way I had it.Dave (talk) 20:11, 23 October 2009 (UTC)
 * Well you are a man of little discussion. We agree on the colors anyway. My suggestion is uniform widths with two sizes, 40% and 60% but I can live with default widths. Think it over. If anyone else has an opinion do chime in (there probably won't be anyone else). While you are at it why don't you correct the tagged section?Dave (talk) 20:47, 23 October 2009 (UTC)


 * You are the one that started the discussion on my personal talk page. See my answers there. &minus;Woodstone (talk) 22:03, 23 October 2009 (UTC)

Tags on dependent-marking languages
Hello Woodstone. I see now I erred in taking out the whole paragraph, which supports the following table. What I found offensive was the characterization of IE languages as dependent marking. I don't know of any such cases in IE. What do you mean by IE? Proto-IE is exclusively head-marked. Every single noun and every single verb are explicitly affixed admittedly on rare occasions with a zero affix. Just what that parenthetical statement mean? Second, the very first sentence of the paragraph is completely unclear. In what sense is that true? What does that mean? The sentence is too sparse and if it follows the parenthetical expression it is probably wrong. For the rest of it, well, if you think we should talk about head marked and dependent marked I have no issue. We need prose that is a little less sparse, more connectors, more explanation of what we are trying to explain. Linguists don;t have any mandate to write gibberish just because it is linguistic. We need some good and clear English prose here. Can you do it? I would say, go ahead, rewrite that. No discuss means I do it my way.Dave (talk) 20:23, 23 October 2009 (UTC)

Assistance for Woodstone
Hello Woodstone. If you need some help with table formatting or with English or anything else on Wikipedia I can provide some help if you tell me what it is you are trying to do. I'm no expert but I have some experience.Dave (talk) 20:23, 23 October 2009 (UTC)


 * Thanks for the condescending offer, but I'm quite capable of formatting wiki tables. That's why I removed all the clutter and brought the tables more in line with regular wiki styling. &minus;Woodstone (talk) 22:05, 23 October 2009 (UTC)


 * Well, that is a somewhat arrogant false statement. I was hoping it wouldn't get to this. You didn't remove any clutter at all, you only reverted the colors and widths. You didn't bring them into line with any Wikipedia styling, I'm the one who did that by adding the class parameter. The tables have a good design now but in no way because of you. So far you have done nothing at all on this round of the editing of this article except interfere with my trying to edit it. I don't find that very helpful. I'm not going to play "reversion" with you until the sysadmins step in. Here is what is wrong with the article. First of all it is full of unreferenced opinion - yours? Wikipedia clearly states that generalities NOT common knowledge need references. Where are your references? I asked you to come up with references for these tags and you have made no move at all to cooperate or to discuss why you think the tags should come off. I'm trying to help do a serious article here, this is a serious effort, and I would appreciate if you would make an effort to follow the policies and stop with the arrogant false assertions. The second thing wrong with this article is that the English is often not up to formal level, is confusing or is incorrect. Are you going to help me straighten this out or what? I'd appreciate it if you would but if you are not I am going ahead without you. Every time you revert without a good reason a tag reflecting the question is going on there. This is only fair, don't you think? The public should be aware if there are problems with this article and other editors, such as are interested in quality linguistics articles, ought to be tipped off. I got no idea why you should have taken this attitude but it seems inappropriate to me. I call it arrogance. This is a cooperative effort not an individual one. I think I am through asking you for YOUR reasons. If you care to give them I will be glad to listen, but I am not going to listen to your arrogant cock-a-doodle dooing. I may not look at this for a while but you always can send me a message in the legitimate way if you decide to get serious. Goodbye.Dave (talk) 02:41, 24 October 2009 (UTC)

Archaic Balto-slavic features
"retaining a number of archaic Indo-European features in their grammar."

This claim has been made for just about every Indo-European language and certainly for every Baltic language and no one ever says what that means. I would say, every ancient feature of every Indo-European language retains a number of ancient Indo-European features; if it didn't, it wouldn't be Indo-European. So let's just cut the baloney. This should be covered in Balto-Slavic languages but it isn't, and it should be covered under each and every Balto-Slavic language, but it isn't even though such a statement is repeated in those places also. There is material out there, especially for Old Prussian, but then there are many who dispute that assertion. We certainly can't use it without references and this brief intro is not the place to get into such a large and disputed topic so the best thing to do is not to use it.Dave (talk) 17:47, 26 October 2009 (UTC)

Syncretism of case forms

 * Syncretism of case forms in Latvian where certain prepositions govern different cases in the singular and in the plural. For example, the Instrumental case is identical to the Accusative in the singular and to the Dative in the plural. These forms could be described as irregular case government of certain prepositions, but there are constructions in which the Instrumental case, for example, is used without any prepositions.

The gobbledeygook concerning Latvian has to go. I got no idea what it says, but I do know what it is trying to say and I am going to give a reference as well as links to other Wikipedia articles. I don't know where the editor went wrong. He was either trying to write without understanding (as is often possible in technical writing) or else he was trying to practice the art of super-condensation and over-condensed. There is no reference on this and detail is excessive so I am going to rewrite it.Dave (talk) 18:59, 26 October 2009 (UTC)

The Latin synthetic perfective
and there were synthetic perfective and passive voice verb forms.

It would be easy to get sarcastic about this. I would say, Mr. editor, you have to be careful about your use of terms and the use of references assists in that event. Writing off the top of your head ought to be a luxury in which you never indulge. This may be only Wikipedia but it is read by a good many people, and you might be working in the privacy of your home but what you say is far from private. Anyway in our corner of the field perfective refers to an aspect, but I suppose you mean the perfect, pluperfect and future perfect passive tenses, which take auxiliary verbs. Synthetic, huh? Read synthetic languages and see if you still think it fits.Dave (talk) 02:42, 27 October 2009 (UTC)


 * Perfect, pluperfect and future perfect aren't necessarily built with auxiliaries. They are single words in Latin. As for the term "perfective", it seems that even the experts are not consistent in how they use it. FilipeS (talk) 12:04, 4 May 2010 (UTC)

Unreferenced unencyclopedic fluff
However, some branches of Indo-European have generally tended to retain more inflection. The branch of Indo-European that has retained the most extensive systems of inflection is the Balto-Slavic branch: Modern Baltic languages are considered the most conservative of all Indo-European languages, and Slavic languages also tend to be highly inflected, with only few exceptions (e.g. Bulgarian). Branches notable for resulting in virtually no highly inflected modern languages include that of the romance languages (although most of these have conserved a good deal of inflection in verb conjugation, case declension is generally resticted to personal pronouns). Other branches resulted in more of a mixed bag: for example, the Germanic branch gave rise to some very inflected languages (such as German and Icelandic, while also giving rise to very uninflected languages, like Modern English, Swedish, and Afrikaans.

We don't put in padding here, only encyclopedic information. This conversational passage is all unsupported opinion about what language is more or less inflected than what. Who cares? Have you got a standard expressing degree of inflection, and if so what hierarchy does it discuss, and who performed the analysis, and where can I find it? Otherwise there is nothing here. What are we to say, Wikipedia thinks the Balto-Slavic languages are more inflected and that that condition is more conservative? You made the main point in the first paragraph, that "deflexion" is occurrng diachronically, and that seems the only point worth making.Dave (talk) 03:12, 27 October 2009 (UTC)

Relation to morphological typology
Inflection is sometimes confused with synthesis in languages. The two terms are related but not the same. Languages are broadly classified morphologically into analytic and synthetic categories, or more realistically along a continuum between the two extremes. Analytic languages isolate meaning into individual words, whereas synthetic languages create words not found in the dictionary by fusing or agglutinating morphemes, sometimes to the extent of having a whole sentence's worth of meaning in a single word. Inflected languages by definition fall into the synthetic category, though not all synthetic languages need be inflected.

The main thing confused around here is this whole section. We start out by saying that the two terms are sometimes confused and that they are related but not the same. We do not then go on to how they are related and how they are not the same and of what the confusion consists. We do go on to to define analytic (was that part of the confusion?) and synthetic. Do we get back to the confusion? I'm afraid not. We then end with the mysterious oracular statement that inflected languages are synthetic but all synthetic languages are not inflected. I thought the topic was confusion. If I wasn't confused before I sure am now. It does not compute .... We need some references here. Who is confused? What are they confused about? Why are they confused? What is confusing? What must they realize to be unconfused? What has all this to do with morphological typology? The topic sentence makes the point. Then you expand and explain. I see no method at all here, sir.Dave (talk) 04:24, 27 October 2009 (UTC)

Auxiliary Languages?
What on Earth are discussions of the inflection of auxiliary languages doing on this page? This is introduction to inflection. That's kind of like discussing the cooking profession in World of Warcraft on an introductory page to food preparation. I think it should be removed completely. 76.93.41.50 (talk) 07:22, 2 December 2009 (UTC)


 * Well then remove it. Unlike you, I think it's perfectly valid to discuss auxiliary languages in this article, but it's not necessary either, because the inflectional systems in these languages (as far as I know) don't do anything special compared to what can already be observed in many natural languages. Unless someone can point to a real innovation in auxiliary languages (and back it up with sources, which are absent from this section), I won't oppose excluding them. CapnPrep (talk) 12:54, 2 December 2009 (UTC)

Origin of inflections
I think it would be nice to talk about the origin of inflections. I think that would interest anyone who was reading the article. Deflexion could also be brought into this. Perhaps we could give a few examples like the Romance future tense. Would this be appropriate for this article? I know if I was reading on this, I'd want to know where they come from. 86.31.21.172 (talk) 02:57, 4 May 2010 (UTC)

This may be a stupid question...
I've just browsed to this article out of interest and noticed something in the lead section that doesn't make sense to me. I'm not a linguist so am not going to barge on ahead and fix what looks like an error in case there is some arcane linguistic reason for describing it that way. The sentence in question is: "In English, the word 'lead' is not marked for either person or number, and is only marked for tense in opposition to 'led' (i.e. is not specifically future tense)." I'd have thought that the word "lead" is not specifically past tense. If the writer of this sentence meant to say that the word "led" is not specifically future tense, then they might want to re-write that sentence, as my reading of its grammar is that the word "lead" is the one that is not specifically future tense. Daveosaurus (talk) 06:38, 31 October 2010 (UTC)