Here's a breakdown:
* Inflections: Changes to the form of a word, often involving adding suffixes or prefixes, to indicate grammatical information.
* Grammatical relationships: The ways words relate to each other in a sentence, such as subject-verb agreement, noun-adjective agreement, and the role of nouns in a sentence (subject, object, etc.).
Examples of inflections:
* English:
* Pluralization: *cat* vs. *cats*
* Past tense: *walk* vs. *walked*
* Comparative and superlative adjectives: *big* vs. *bigger* vs. *biggest*
* Latin:
* Case: *rosa* (nominative, the rose) vs. *rosam* (accusative, the rose)
* Gender: *amicus* (masculine, friend) vs. *amica* (feminine, friend)
* Number: *puer* (singular, boy) vs. *pueri* (plural, boys)
Inflected languages vs. isolating languages:
Inflected languages contrast with isolating languages, which use word order and separate function words to convey grammatical relationships. For example, in English, the sentence "The cat sat on the mat" uses word order to show the subject (the cat) and the object (the mat). In Chinese, the same sentence might be written with a word order like "Cat mat sit on," with no inflections used.
Examples of inflected languages:
* Indo-European languages: English, German, French, Spanish, Russian, Hindi, etc.
* Semitic languages: Arabic, Hebrew, Aramaic, etc.
* Turkic languages: Turkish, Azerbaijani, Uzbek, etc.
It's important to note that even within a language family, there can be variations in the degree of inflection. For example, English is considered a relatively analytically inflected language (it uses fewer inflections than many other Indo-European languages), while German is considered more synthetically inflected (it uses more inflections).