Inflektoitu

Inflektoitu is a term used in linguistics to describe a word that has undergone inflection. Inflection is a morphological process where a word's form is changed to express grammatical categories such as tense, mood, voice, aspect, person, number, gender, and case. For example, in English, the verb "walk" is inflected to "walks" to indicate the third-person singular present tense, or to "walked" to show the past tense. Similarly, the noun "cat" can be inflected to "cats" to show the plural number.

Inflection differs from derivation, which creates a new word with a different meaning or part of speech. For instance, adding the suffix "-er" to "walk" creates "walker," a derived noun meaning "one who walks." Inflected forms are typically still the same word, just in a different grammatical form.

Languages vary greatly in how much they utilize inflection. Highly inflected languages, like Latin or Finnish, mark many grammatical relationships directly on the words themselves. Less inflected languages, such as English, rely more on word order and auxiliary words to convey grammatical meaning. The study of inflection is a core component of morphology, the branch of linguistics that deals with the structure of words. Understanding inflection is crucial for analyzing sentence structure and comprehending the grammatical nuances of a language.