In linguistics, declension (verb: to decline) is the changing of the form of a word, generally to express its syntactic function in the sentence, by way of some inflection.
It is an important aspect of language families like Quechuan (i.e., languages native to the Andes), Indo-European (e.g. German, Icelandic, Irish, Lithuanian and Latvian, Slavic, Sanskrit, Latin, Ancient and Modern Greek, Albanian, Romanian, Kurdish, Classical and Modern Armenian),[excessive detail?]
Bantu (e.g. Swahili, Zulu, Kikuyu), Semitic (e.g. Modern Standard Arabic), Finno-Ugric (e.g. Hungarian, Finnish, Estonian), and Turkic (e.g. Turkish).
Unlike English, many languages use suffixes to specify subjects and objects and word cases in general.
[4] Using the case suffixes invented for this example, the original sentence would read: And like other inflected languages, the sentence rearranged in the following ways would mean virtually the same thing, but with different expressiveness:[5] Instead of the locative, the instrumental form of "down our street" could also be used:[6] Different word orders preserving the original meaning are possible in an inflected language,[5] while modern English relies on word order for meaning, with a little flexibility.
In inflected languages, other parts of speech such as numerals, demonstratives, adjectives,[7] and articles[8] are also declined.
Similarly, names borrowed from other languages show comparable distinctions: Andrew and Andrea, Paul and Paula, etc.
For example, the proper noun Britain has the associated descriptive adjective British and the demonym Briton.
The one situation where gender[note 2] is still clearly part of the English language is in the pronouns for the third person singular.
Its use has expanded in recent years due to increasing social recognition of persons who do not identify themselves as male or female[13] (see gender-nonbinary).
There are five important cases for Latin nouns: nominative, genitive, dative, accusative, and ablative.
Since the vocative case usually takes the same form as the nominative, it is seldom spelt out in grammar books.
Given below is the declension paradigm of Latin puer 'boy' and puella 'girl': From the provided examples we can see how cases work: liberbookpuerīboy.GENliber puerībook boy.GENthe book of the boypuerboy.NOMpuellaegirl.DATrosamrose.ACCdatgive.3SG.PRESpuer puellae rosam datboy.NOM girl.DAT rose.ACC give.3SG.PRESthe boy gives the girl a roseSanskrit, another Indo-European language, has eight cases: nominative, vocative, accusative, genitive, dative, ablative, locative and instrumental.
[14] Some do not count vocative as a separate case, despite it having a distinctive ending in the singular, but consider it as a different use of the nominative.
The grammarian Pāṇini identified six semantic roles or karaka, which correspond closely to the eight cases:[16] For example, consider the following sentence: vṛkṣ-ātfrom the treeparṇ-aṁa leafbhūm-āuto the groundpatatifallsvṛkṣ-āt parṇ-aṁ bhūm-āu patati{from the tree} {a leaf} {to the ground} falls"a leaf falls from the tree to the ground"Here leaf is the agent, tree is the source, and ground is the locus.
Verse 37 of the Rāmarakṣāstotram gives an example of all 8 types of declensions in Sanskrit for the singular proper noun Rāma.