The Latin term desĭnens , which derives from desinĕre , came to our language as desinencia . 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 root to indicate a certain accident of inflection (the alteration that the 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 manner 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 . To construct the various verbal forms, the different endings or morphemes are added. This is how conjugated verbs can be constructed such as comeremos , ate , comerán or comen , for example . As you can see, eremos , ió , erán or en are added to the root com , 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 the indicative mood. This leads to the verbal form we will eat ( 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 tense 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 verbal conjugations are the most challenging aspect for them. This opinion is usually given by those people 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 whether the subject is "I", "he" or "you", for example, and whether the action is located in the past, in the future or if it is a condition; But there are many that lack a conjugation based on roots and endings like ours, and that really need other types of words to provide that data in a sentence.
In English, for example, although it is possible to conjugate verbs, it is a rather rudimentary aspect of the language compared to Spanish grammar: English speakers do not have "verb tenses" per se, since the same conjugation It can serve to reflect tenses as diverse as the Simple Past Perfect of the Indicative mood and the Past Imperfect of the Subjunctive . With some exceptions, context is usually necessary to know who performs the action.
Japanese makes it even more difficult to deduce this and other information just by looking at a verb. From the perspective of 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 verbal conjugation.