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Introduction to Inflected Languages
Latin and Greek are inflected languages, while English is not. An inflected language is
one in which the words of the language are comprised of roots, or stems, and
inflections, or endings. The roots remain relatively stable, and the inflections change
depending on what job the word is doing in the sentence.
Here is an example of four English sentences using the word milk in different ways:
Cold milk tastes good with warm cookies.
The boy spilled the milk.
The farmer will milk the cow tomorrow.
A kitten’s milk teeth are sharp.
In the first two sentences, the word milk is used as a noun, in the first sentence as
the subject doing the action, and in the second sentence as the direct object
receiving the action. In the third sentence the word milk is used as a verb, and in the
fourth it is used as an adjective describing the noun teeth. In English the only way
we can tell what job the word milk is doing in each sentence is through word order
and context. But in inflected languages, such as Latin and Greek, the jobs are very
easily determined by the roots and endings (inflections) attached to those roots. A
noun would have certain inflections, a verb something else, and so on. Even a
subject has different inflections than a direct object.
Dorothy Sayers in her essay, The Lost Tools of Learning, says that the inflected
languages interpret the uninflected. This means that understanding the grammar of
an inflected language such as Latin or Greek will help a child understand the
grammar of an uninflected language such as English when it is time.
Introduction to Inflected Languages © 2005 by Christine Miller
http://classical-homeschooling.org/v2/index.php?page=82