Why does Latin have so many different endings?

Answer 1

Not that you should point fingers, but the Romans adopted this habit of ending changes (fancy name is declensions for nouns/adjectives and conjugations for verbs) from the Greek language. A fancy word for changing endings based on functionality in a sentence is that this is a characteristic of INFLECTED languages—bending the word.

The bonus to learning all of these endings for you, is that it will help you with Greek, Russian, and most all western languages (900 million people worldwide) because they Romance languages (Italian, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Romanian) inherited declining and conjugating from their Greek and Roman parents.

An added bonus is that these various endings make Latin based languages more succinct. Generally, you can say more in Latin/Greek and the Romance languages generally with fewer words. An basic example of this brevity is MGM’s movie logo motto with the roaring lion: Ars Gratia Artis. (Art for the Sake of Art by 1st century BC poet, Horace). 3 words in Latin to 6 words in English. Another example is in Virginia’s official state motto, “Sic Semper Tyrannis”. Like This Always To Tyrants. 3 Latin words to 5 English words.

English does conjugate and decline as well but to a very mild extent. For example:

Conjugate: jump, jumps, jumped, jumping

Decline: Jack, Jack’s, girl, girl’s, girls’. That’s all for the English—it is different for pronouns though—(him, his, he, her, hers, she...