Why do languages have inflections?

Question

It seemed to me that if they have to tell the speaker what situation theiy're in with some enclitic then they aren't lazy writer's they're stupid or lazy thinkers.
I'm not a linguist, but it struck me odd when in English I think about context a lot to sort it out with my (admittedly) slow, but deep mind. Any help?

Answer 1

Your point of view is very narrow. There are a variety of things which speakers MUST communicate to one another and there are multiple strategies to do this. For example, if a sentence has three different nouns in it, there must be some system to determine what relationship those nouns bear to each other. Which noun is the agent? Which noun is the object? Which noun is the recipient? There are three main strategies which languages use to mark these relationships--word order, nominal inflection, verbal cross-referencing. English happens to use word order. Latin uses nominal inflection, that is, each noun has a suffix which indicates its role within the sentence. With this marking, word order is not important since it is not needed to mark nominal relationships. Swahili uses verbal inflection, where a prefix matching the noun class of each noun is placed in a specific order as a verb prefix. There is no inherent superiority in any of these three methods and the languages of the world have evolved these systems quite easily to mark the relationships between nouns in a sentence. It is NOT "laziness" or "stupidity". They are simply different strategies to accomplish the same end.

Answer 2

English has very rigid word order. In other languages, you have many more choices as to how to arrange words, giving you the possibility to place emphasis, shift focus, etc. However,t hat flexibility comes at a price: word order therefore gives less information about the specific *roles* the words have in a sentence, e.g. actor or object.

In other languages, the inflections tell the speakers the role of the word, thereby leaving word order more flexible.

(The best way to understand this is to actually study a foreign language - it's hard to understand these things when you look at it from the POV of English only.)

Answer 3

Inflections place emphasis on words written that are intrinsically understood when talking with a person.

When approaching two people, and asking one of them to do something, we get two different interpretations from the following phrases:

1. Jenna, I want you to go to the store.
2. Jenna, I want YOU to go to the store.

Inflection in the second sentence leaves the impression that you might trust Jenna more than the other person, or that you're placing the responsibility on her and do not want her to pass the job off to anyone else. Without that inflection, as in the first sentence, you leave the impression that you're just giving her a job to do, but placing no restrictions on anyone else's ability to do the job.