Meera wrote:Well we learned that Arabic has eleven different categories of inflection, is this considered a normal amount in a language or is this a lot? If you want I can list the ones are book uses.
Hmm...
1. Number (singular, dual, plural)
2. Gender (masculine, feminine)
3. Animacy (animate, inanimate)
4. Case (nominative, accusative, oblique/genitive)
5. State / definiteness (definite, indefinite, construct)
6. Person (first, second, third)
7. Tense in MSA (past, non-past) (or Aspect in CA (perfective, imperfective))
8. Mood (indicative, subjunctive, jussive, imperative, -na energetic, -anna energetic)
9. Voice (active, passive)
I can't think of anything else. What are the other two? These are all the ones there are unless you consider the verbal forms to be inflections maybe, but that'd be weird as I think they should be considered derivations instead.
It seems like a normal amount for me. Consider that Spanish has: 1. number, 2. gender, 3. case (in personal pronouns), 4. person, 5. tense, 6. aspect, 7. mood, 8. voice.
On the other hand, Classical Chinese has only two categories: 1. person (in its personal pronouns), 2. case (in its personal pronouns). (That's right! Classical Chinese doesn't even distinguish
number in its personal pronouns!)
On yet another hand, Ojibwe, a polysynthetic language, has: 1. number, 2. animacy, 3. obviation / topicality (topic marking for noun phrases), 4. possession, 5. conjunctivity (whether a verb is in a subordinate sentence), 6. tense, 7. mood, 8. aspect (note that you can have multiple aspect marking in a row, including wishing to do something, beginning doing something, doing something thoroughly, etc., so this
should count as more than one), 9. valency / transitivity, 10. voice, 11. person.