User:RMFan1/Grammar Summary

Declension

 * Performed on nominals (nouns, pronouns, adjectives, determiners)
 * Involves number, case, gender

Conjugation

 * Performed on verbs
 * Involves tense, mood, voice, aspect

Number

 * Expresses count distinctions (i.e. singular, plural, etc)
 * Dog / Dogs, Child / Children, etc
 * Though most languages only make a distinction between singular and plurals, other languages make further distinctions such as dual, trial etc.

Case

 * The case of a noun or pronoun indicates its grammatical function in a greater phrase or clause (i.e. whether the (pro)noun is the subject, object or possessor)
 * For example, consider these pronouns which are of different cases and thus indicate different functions:
 * I is used when the person in question is the subject (performing an action): "I sat on the chair"
 * me is used when the person in question is the object (having an action performed on him/her): "He hit me"
 * my or mine are used to indicate possession: "My chair" or "The chair is mine"
 * English does not rely much on inflection but on word order to convey meaning. In other languages (Latin, for example), however, inflection is very important because it does not rely on word order (though often there is a preferred order).
 * To help illustrate this consider this sentence "He hit me". In Latin this could also be written as "Me hit he". The meaning is conveyed by the case of the nouns not word order. Thus is would be correctly interpreted as "He hit me" and not "I hit him"
 * Note that, although I have only shown you 3 cases above, there are more.

Gender

 * Describes the gender of a noun which may be masculine, feminine or neuter.
 * For example, Spanish word for "dog" depends on the gender of the dog in question. When referring to a male dog, perro is used. When referring to a female dog, perra is used.