Declension

Declension, a grammatical term applied by the ancient grammarians to the system of modifications called cases, which in many languages nouns, pronouns, and adjectives undergo to indicate the various relations in which they stand to other words. The word Case means 'falling;' Declension, a 'sloping down;' and were applied because that form of a noun used as the subject of a sentence was supposed to be represented by an upright line, and the other forms by lines falling or sloping off from this upright line at different angles. Hence a collection of the various forms which a noun might assume formed the declension or sloping down of the noun. The English language has no proper declensions at all, having no cases but the genitive, and some traces of a dative, while it has no genders save in the pronouns of the third person. The Sanskrit language again had eight cases; Latin, six; and Greek, five. Groups of nouns forming their case-endings in the same way are called declensions. Thus Latin nouns are said to be divided into five declensions. The Latin cases are the Nominative, which names the subject or actor; the Genitive, expressing the source whence something proceeds, or to which it belongs; the Dative, that to which something is given, or for which it is done; the Accusative, the object towards which an action is directed; the Vocative, the person addressed or called; and the Ablative, that from which something is taken. The Greek has no Ablative case, while the two additional cases of Sanskrit are an Instrumental case, and a Locative case. In time case-endings become rubbed off, and prepositions are used in their stead, thus French and Italian have lost all the Latin cases of nouns and adjectives. Languages of the agglutinating order have, in general, a great abundance of cases. Thus Finnish nouns have fifteen cases; and in Magyar as many as twenty cases may be reckoned. See GRAMMAR and PHILOLOGY.