Talk:Uninflected word

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I amd not sure what you mean by "word". Surely in plurals it takes the affix "s"? Did you mean "Word has it that ..."? --Dieter


 * Word is uninflected; words is inflected. -- Montr&eacute;alais

Yes, I see that, but the original article was about "particles" which are never inflected unless they are changed to nouns or verbs, as in "ifs and buts" ("if" and "but" are sentence connectors here); or as in "humming and hawing" ("hum" is an interjection in this case). There is a separate item about grammatical particles. --Dieter Simon
 * Is this a good place to mention the declining use of inflection of words in English? --dgd

Is this the declining use of inflection over the last two centuries or a more recent phenomenon? --Dieter Simon

Intended merger of Uninflected word with lemma
For some reason or other it has been suggested that "uninflected word" should be merged into "lemma". I am afraid, I must disagree utterly. Although the word "go", for example, may be the lemma of all its other inflected forms "goes", "going", "went", etc., it is not an uninflected word. An uninflected word cannot be inflected under any circumstances, and therefore never has any affixes, ablauts, etc., whatsoever, and so does it change its morphology. We are talking about words such as "about", "then", "for", "hello", "Yes", etc., in English, and "fũr", "ja", "aha", etc., in German, just to take two languages as examples. Since we are talking about two entirely different concepts then, the need for a merger just would not arise. By all means, link them as "see also" items, but do not conflate them. Because of there being two entirely separate concepts I am removing the merger notice tag, since it obviates any need to discuss a merger. Dieter Simon 23:43, 3 August 2007 (UTC)

Opening sentence
That opening line is one of the least helpful I've encountered on these pages. Wikipedia is meant to assist the public in understanding and is not a platform for academics to show off their technical lexicon. The easiest thing in the world is to make something unintelligible. The clever people can make a difficult topic clear. Jonwoss00 (talk) 19:11, 13 April 2010 (UTC)