spellinginflection

Spelling inflection is a term used in linguistics and orthography to describe how a writing system encodes or reflects inflectional morphology. It concerns the relationship between the written form of a word and its grammatical inflections, such as tense, number, case, gender, mood, or aspect, and how these inflections are signaled in spelling. In some languages, inflectional information is overtly marked by endings in the written word, while in others, spelling may be regularized or opaque, with inflected forms sharing the same spelling or the inflection not being indicated at all in orthography.

English uses suffixes such as -s for plurals, -ed for past tense, and -ing for participles, but irregular verbs and vowel changes complicate the relationship between pronunciation and spelling. German and Russian often show inflection densely in spelling through case endings and agreement, whereas Turkish uses vowel harmony and agglutination to produce long, morphologically transparent spellings. Some languages use diacritics or special characters to mark inflection or related grammatical features, e.g., Romanian with diacritics, Hungarian with vowel length distinctions.

Orthographic depth affects the clarity of inflectional information in writing. Shallow orthographies tend to align spelling with pronunciation and often reflect inflection through predictable endings; deep orthographies may preserve historical forms that do not mirror pronunciation, requiring learners to memorize inflectional spellings. Historical reforms sometimes aim to regularize or simplify spelling with respect to morphology, but reforms may also preserve historical inflectional distinctions for continuity.

In modern contexts, spelling inflection matters for natural language processing, spell checking, lemmatization, and morphological analysis, as accurate interpretation relies on recognizing inflected spellings and their underlying lemmas.