You mentioned under inflection that its affixes are usually suffixes, and that got me thinking about Irish Gaelic, which actually modifies the beginning of a word based on its context (in addition to the end).
"bean": "a woman" "an bhean": "the woman" (Some nouns get their initial consonant lenited. Sometimes.)
"Corcaigh": "Cork" (the Irish town) "i gCorcaigh": "in Cork" (Sometimes a new voiced consonant appears before and "eclipses" an unvoiced one. Sometimes.)
I don't know if these mutations count as inflection or not. I'm not sure they necessarily change the grammatical usage of the word in question: they're usually markers of some other word's grammatical context. I'm not sure what they would count as, though.
Gah, I should have kept linking and reading. Looks like an example of external sandhi (akin to French liaison), though it's not clear to me if deriving from a phonological mutation precludes it from fitting under another definition in your list.
Sorry, I should have noted that my notes almost always refer to English. :)
A woman vs the woman - I'm not sure if that's inflectional or not, since a/the isn't really a grammatical function (that refers to subject, object, etc.).
Not sure about the other one either. It may be a syntactical thing, which is the next chapter. :)
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"bean": "a woman"
"an bhean": "the woman" (Some nouns get their initial consonant lenited. Sometimes.)
"Corcaigh": "Cork" (the Irish town)
"i gCorcaigh": "in Cork" (Sometimes a new voiced consonant appears before and "eclipses" an unvoiced one. Sometimes.)
I don't know if these mutations count as inflection or not. I'm not sure they necessarily change the grammatical usage of the word in question: they're usually markers of some other word's grammatical context. I'm not sure what they would count as, though.
Anyway, interesting stuff. I heart Irish Gaelic.
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A woman vs the woman - I'm not sure if that's inflectional or not, since a/the isn't really a grammatical function (that refers to subject, object, etc.).
Not sure about the other one either. It may be a syntactical thing, which is the next chapter. :)
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