#inflected language

Estonian is said to be a “transitional form from an agglutinating to an inflected language”, an opinion most of us would find hard to argue with, but not very helpful either. Without going into too much detail and embarrassing myself, what it essentially boils down to is that it piles dozens of different endings (usually one at a time, thank God) onto the root of the word, and, in case that’s too easy, changes the root spelling. In English, for example, a river’s a river. OK, you take on an “s” if there’s lots of them but that’s about it, although one or two verbs are, admittedly, a bit iffy, with speak, spake, spook, as Hyman Kaplan would have said, but Estonian? It’s on viagra... Take a look at this:

Nominative - jõgi - river

Genitive - jõe - of the/a river

Partitive - jõge - e.g. pumping the/a river*

Illative - jõesse - into the/a river

Inessive - jões - in the/a river

Elative - jõest - from, out of the/a river

Allative - jõele - to the/a river

Adessive - jõel - upon, on the/a river

Ablative - jõelt - from, off the/a river

Translative - jõeks - for, as the/a river

Essive - jõena - as the/a river

Terminative - jõeni - up to, until the/a river

Abessive - jõeta - without the/a river

Comitative - jõega - with the/a river

* Partitive singular also used for number of things, so two rivers would be kaks jõge... (see below)

... which raises various points: this is the singular so multiply by two; no difference between “the” and “a”; adjectives only follow suit until the translative, after which they throw up their hands in despair and go genitive (which does actually simplify things); various forms get shortened (e.g. illative jõesse to jõkke, a real ink saver that one); the inessive plural probably has two forms and on-one even mentions the instructive (or the prolative), then there’s the exceptions, the maybes, the sort-ofs, and the ones that no-one’s quite sure about. Rumor has it that Estonia has a 24/7 helpline for natives worried about their declining capabilities... Anyone remember German or Latin with its pathetic little band of conjugations and declensions (der, die, das, amo, amas, amat)? Estonian has 600 of the buggers.

tldr: Declension, Inflection, Cases.

Declension: in linguistics, declension is the inflection (changing the form of a word) of nouns, pronouns, adjectives, and articles to indicate number (at least singular and plural), case (nominative or subjective, genitive or possessive, etc.), and/or gender. A declension is also a group of nouns that follow a particular pattern of inflection.

Inflected language: Fusional languages or inflected languages are a type of synthetic languages, distinguished from agglutinative languages by their tendency to use a single inflectional morpheme to denote multiple grammatical, syntactic, or semantic features. For example, the Spanish verb comer ("to eat") has the first-person singular preterite tense form comí ('I ate'); the single suffix -í represents both the features of first-person singular agreement and preterite tense, instead of having a separate affix for each feature.

An illustration of fusionality is the Latin word bonus ("good"). The ending -us denotes masculine gender, nominative case, and singular number. Changing any one of these features requires replacing the suffix -us with a different one. In the form bonum, the ending -um denotes masculine accusative singular, neuter accusative singular, or neuter nominative singular.

Cases: Case is a special grammatical category of a noun, pronoun, adjective, participle or numeral whose value reflects the grammatical function performed by that word in a phrase, clause, or sentence. In some languages, nouns, pronouns, adjectives, determiners, participles, prepositions, numerals, articles and their modifiers take different inflected forms depending on what case they are in.

English has largely lost its case system, although personal pronouns still have three cases that are simplified forms of the nominative, accusative and genitive cases: subjective case (I, you, he, she, it, we, they, who, whoever), objective case (me, you, him, her, it, us, them, whom, whomever) and possessive case (my, mine; your, yours; his; her, hers; its; our, ours; their, theirs; whose; whosever). Forms such as I, he and we are used for the subject ("I kicked the ball"), whereas forms such as me, him and us are used for the object ("John kicked me").

Languages such as Sanskrit, Ancient Greek, Latin, Armenian, Hungarian, Hindi, Tibetan, Czech, Slovak, Turkish, Tamil, Romanian, Russian, Polish, Serbo-Croatian, Estonian, Finnish, Icelandic, Belarusian, Ukrainian, Lithuanian, Basque, Esperanto and the majority of Caucasian languages have extensive case systems, with nouns, pronouns, adjectives, and determiners all inflecting (usually by means of different suffixes) to indicate their case. The number of cases differs between languages: German and Icelandic have four; Turkish, Latin and Russian each have at least six; Armenian, Czech, Polish, Serbian, Croatian, Ukrainian, and Lithuanian have seven; Sanskrit has eight; Estonian and Finnish have fifteen, Hungarian has eighteen and Tsez has sixty-four.