Inflection

Grammatical inflection is a way of changing a word to show different meanings or grammatical details without adding extra words.

This might involve altering the ending of a word or adding a little part to the word. For example:

– In English, we add “-s” to a noun to make it plural, like changing “cat” to “cats.”
– We change verbs to show when something happens, like changing “run” to “ran” for something that happened in the past.

Inflection helps convey important information such as whether a noun is singular or plural, whether a verb is referring to the past or present, and who is doing the action, all by just tweaking parts of words.