What Does ending Mean
The Latin term desĭnens , which derives from desinĕre , came to our language as an ending . This concept is used in the field of grammar to name the inflectional morpheme that is added to a root , especially that of a verb.
The ending, therefore, is a phonological segment that is placed next to the stem to indicate a certain accident of inflection (the alteration that terms undergo to encode certain grammatical contents). What the ending allows is to add a grammatical value .
It can be said that the ending is a variable ending . In a verb , it makes it possible to indicate the person, the time, the mode and the number. The root or lexeme, on the other hand, is invariable.
Take the case of the verb eat . The root of this verb is com . For the construction of the various verb forms, the different endings or morphemes are added. Thus conjugated verbs such as we will eat , ate , will eat or eat , for example, can be constructed . As you can see, the root com is added eremos , ió , erán or en , as the case may be.
The endings, in short, incorporate the grammatical accidents that provide more information about the verb. The grammatical meaning, in fact, is given by the presence of the ending that complements the root. Returning to the first of the examples mentioned above, the ending eremos , added to the lexeme com , indicates that the verb has a plural number, refers to an action in the future tense and is conjugated in an indicative mood. Thus we arrive at the verb form comeremos ( com + eremos ).
In our language, therefore, the ending plays a fundamental role when putting together a sentence of a certain complexity, since without its presence we cannot provide our interlocutor with all the necessary data to decode the message. The person who performs the action, which can be singular or plural, and the time in which we conjugate the verb are very important in Spanish, although this does not mean that the same thing happens in all languages.
Foreign students who venture into learning our language often mention that verb conjugations are the most challenging aspect for them. This opinion is usually given by those whose native languages do not have such a level of complexity in the construction of verbs, since there are others where it is even greater, such as French and Hungarian.
It is difficult for us to imagine a language in which it is not enough to take a look at a conjugated verb to know if the subject is "I", "he" or "you", for example, and if the action is located in the past, in the future or if it is a condition; but there are many who lack a conjugation based on a root and ending like ours, and who really need the other types of words to provide that data in a sentence.
In English, for example, although it is possible to conjugate verbs, this is a rather rudimentary aspect of the language compared to Spanish grammar: English speakers do not have proper 'verb tenses', since the same conjugation it can serve to reflect such disparate tenses as the Simple Past Perfect of the Indicative mood and the Subjunctive Past Perfect . With exceptions, to know who performs the action, the context is usually necessary.
Japanese makes it even more difficult to deduce this and other data just by looking at a verb. From the perspective of the Castilian forms, we can say that this language also applies an ending to its verbs to conjugate them; however, neither the person who made them nor the number can be seen in them. This explains why English speakers and Japanese are in the aforementioned group of students who are surprised by the challenges of our verb conjugation.