1187: A Decline in Declension? Mar 10, 2018

Anyone who has studied an inflected language as a native-speaker of an uninflected language may have the question "do people always use cases right?". After all, there are plenty of examples showing that often, the rules of word-order as a method for supplying syntactic information are subverted, as with starting a clause with an object or sometimes just plain broken, as with "...than me" as opposed to "...than I". The answer to the question is that languages with a lot of morphology tend to lose those agglutinative tendencies over time, as was the situation with Ancient Latin's seven cases becoming five in Classical Latin and then as it morphed into Vulgar Latin (and became the modern Romance Languages), the cases were lost wholesale. Even some speaker of Modern Spanish often use pronouns instead of conjugational endings, as is the case in English. Does this mean that eventually there will be no inflection?—no. Logically, a heavily inflected language is more likely to lose morphological structures than gain them given there is only so much inflection a language can have anyway (though this number is quite high; e.g. Kalaallisut has 34 conjugational endings just for present tense indicative active verbs, while most languages only have 6 or fewer).

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