User blog:Bromley/Imperatives, inflections, declensions and the simple complexity of the English language (grammar)

A Reddit users asked what is the grammatical form of the word "stop" in the sentence, "Stop peeling the potatoes":

The rule here is that the "imperative" form a verb to express a command, as in "Stop peeling the potatoes" drops the subject, "you", which is implied in the command "stop" (i.e., "You stop!")

But it's a good opportunity to build a greater command of English with a deeper look.

English uses "inflections", or stem-changes (called "declensions"), at the end of words in order to indicate case, gender, tense, voice, etc. For example, we might say in English, "one dog" and "two dogs", so the "s" indicates more than one dog (plurality). Or, we might add an apostrophe-s to a noun to indicate possession, as in "dog's bone". Similarly, we change verbs to express "person" (I, you, he/she/it, we, they) or tense, such as "I peel" v. "I peeled".

We're used to it, so we don't think about it, much less stop to consider the grammatical functions that indicate important meanings and distinctions we wish to convey.

However, in many other languages, inflections indicate a much wider variety of grammatical forms. We say in English, "my red shoes", whereas in Spanish we'd say, "Mis zapatos rojos", inflecting both the noun, "shoes" and the adjective "red" to the plural. Literally translated, it reads from Spanish to English, "my reds shoes." As English evolved from Old to Middle to Modern English, these plural "markers" disappeared, although we still see remnants of it in older words such as "children", where the "-en" marks the plural of "child".

English also has some cool tricks, such as use of the "zzz", sound to mark a possessive noun, thus "horse's saddle", with the 's marking possession or type (such as the "Steve's moves", which indicates not possession of "moves" but a characteristic of them). In French or Spanish, "horse's saddle" is expressed with "of", as in "saddle of the horse" (selle de cheval).

Latin, however, would inflect the noun "horse" in order to express that it possesses the saddle. So equus, for horse, becomes equi to indicate possession. Similarly, to indicate giving hay "to the horse," where "horse" is the indirect object of the verb "to give", Latin would simply change the stem of "equus" to "equo" to show that the horse is the indirect recipient of the action.

On the way to modern English, our language dropped this declension and picked up the word "to" to indicate indirect recipient of an action (indirect object), such as "I gave hay to the horse". Note that we can even drop the "to" and still understand that the horse is the indirect recipient of giving hay: "I gave the horse hay."

[English gets crazier with this construction, "I gave the horse hay" because we could read it as either "I gave hay to the horse" or "I gave 'horse hay'" (as in "I gave the kind of hay that is for horses")]

Just as we understand "children", "dog's", "to the horse," "red shoes" etc. in English, in languages that use extensive declensions, speakers naturally understand word and sentence meaning based upon those stem-changes. Latin nouns, for example have a variety of cases, such as "nomitive" (the base word), "genetive" (possessive), "dative" (indirect object), "accusitive" (direct object), "vocative" (essentially, being spoken to) and "ablative" (object of certain prepositions, such as from, with, by, often in the sense of an adverb, such as "with care" = "carefully").

Enough of that, and back to your question about "Stop peeling the potatoes": https://www.reddit.com/r/grammar/comments/yd5ad6/doubt_regarding_use_of_the_word_stop/

Note that what I wrote, "enough of that", could be a complete sentence: "Enough of that!" How is that possible, since it has no subject (noun) or predicate (verb and result), which are the base of a complete sentence? "Enough of that" is what we call an "exclamatory" sentence. Note that the fuller sentence (called "declarative") would be "I have had enough of that!" So, we drop the subject-verb, and merely state the object as a complete sentence or even a single word, "Enough!" The meaning is effectively communicated.

The idea here is to recognize how English uses inflections and conjugations the same as other languages that seem overly complicated to English-speakers. As a teacher, I find that students learn more English grammar while studying Spanish or French than they do in their "English" classes.

Here we get to your verb, "stop."

When I say "Enough!", I am actually saying, "I have had enough of what you are doing!" We can see "Enough!", then, as either an exclamation that expresses my emotion or as a command, which means I'm telling you to stop what you're doing: "Enough!"

Similarly, when you say, "Stop peeling the potatoes", it is a command that assumes a recipient of the command. Called an "imperative," it drops the subject, leaving just the verb, "stop". Thus, as explained by another commenter here, the command, "You stop" becomes simply "stop." In Latin, the imperative is expressed with a specific declension to indicate 1) the command; and 2) the "person" (you, he, us, you all, they). Outside of "you", in English, we would need to direct the command to a specific person by saying, "Let's stop!" or "Make him stop" -- so Latin is more efficient in this regard.