Why Does Adding Three Letters Change Everything? Endings Do the Grammar

Elements added to the end of a word divide into two kinds doing quite different work. One kind makes a new word, frequently changing the part of speech, so a verb becomes a noun or an adjective becomes a verb, and the result is a separate entry in a dictionary with its own meaning. The other kind marks a grammatical relationship without making a new word, indicating plural, tense, person, case or comparison, and the result is a form of the same word rather than a different one. English uses very few of the second kind, having lost nearly all of them, which is why it relies so heavily on word order and on small separate words instead.

The surviving grammatical endings in English are remarkably few:

• •Plural on nouns
• •Possessive on nouns
• •Third person singular on present tense verbs
• •Past tense and past participle on verbs
• •Present participle on verbs
• •Comparative and superlative on short adjectives

The contrast with languages that mark heavily is instructive about what word order is for. Latin, Russian, Finnish and Turkish attach endings indicating the grammatical role of each noun in the sentence, so the subject and the object are identified by their form rather than by their position, which means word order can be varied freely for emphasis without confusing anybody. Finnish and Hungarian attach elements corresponding to what English expresses with separate prepositions, so a single word carries information that English spreads over several. Turkish attaches a sequence of elements each adding one piece of meaning, producing words of considerable length whose structure is entirely regular and readable in order.

English makes new words with a set of endings drawn from several languages and the source frequently determines the register. Endings from Old English produce plain everyday words. Endings from Latin and French produce the vocabulary of law, administration and abstraction, which is why formal writing is dense with them and why a text can be made to sound official simply by preferring them. Endings from Greek supply the technical vocabulary of science and medicine almost entirely. Speakers apply these productively to words of any origin, producing hybrids that purists have objected to for centuries and that are now entirely standard. Which ending attaches to which word is largely arbitrary and has to be learned individually, which is a persistent difficulty for learners.

Endings are not stable and their history shows where they come from and where they go. They frequently begin as separate words that came to be used so often in one position that they attached to the preceding word and lost their independence, which is documented across many languages and is the standard route by which a language acquires them. They then erode, since unstressed final syllables are pronounced weakly and eventually disappear, which is exactly what happened to the elaborate case endings of Old English over a few centuries. A language losing its endings must express the same relationships another way, which is why English word order became rigid as its endings collapsed, and the two changes happened together.

One kind of ending makes a new word with its own dictionary entry, frequently changing the part of speech, while the other marks a grammatical relationship without making a new word. English retains very few of the second kind and compensates with rigid word order and separate small words. Endings typically begin as separate words that attached, then erode away, and English word order became fixed as its endings collapsed.