Inflection

In many languages, biblical Hebrew and Greek included, the relationship of a word to others in the sentence is indicated by changes to the form of the word. The change in the form of the word is termed inflection (the cluster of letters used for inflection, taken together, are called afformatives; afformative may be placed at the beginning of the word (prefix), at the end (suffix), or inserted in the middle (infix). The inflection of verbs is called conjugation (i.e., we conjugate verbs). The inflection of non-verbs, such as nouns, adjectives, pronouns, etc, is termed declension (i.e., we decline nouns, etc.).

Words are not much inflected in the English language. One example, however, is the verb 'to be.' Conjugated, the verb 'to be' becomes:

am — for the 1st person singular present, e.g., "I am . . ."

are — for 1st person plural, e.g., "We are . . .", or 2nd person singular or plural, e.g., "You are . . ." or 3rd person plural present, e.g., "They are . . .",

is — for 3rd person singular present, e.g., "He/she is . . .",

was — for 3rd person singular past, e.g,. "He/she was . . ."

were — for 3rd person plural past, e.g., "They were . . ."

Inflection permits Greek, e.g., to ignore the word order in a sentence; from the inflections of the words, e.g., in something like "the dog the man chases" one can accurately decide who/what chases and who/what is chased. In Hebrew, also, e.g., it is possible to say "I love you" with just one word. Inflection also means that, for someone new to the language, there is a great deal more to learn, compared, e.g., to English or Chinese (though learning to recognize the individual words of the Chinese vocabulary is just as painful).