Syncretism (linguistics)

In linguistics, syncretism is the identity of form of distinct morphological forms of a word.

For example, in English, the nominative and accusative forms of "you" and "it" are the same, whereas "he"/"him", "she"/"her", etc., have different forms depending on grammatical case. In Latin, the nominative and vocative of third-declension nouns have the same form (e.g. "rēx" "king" is both nominative and vocative singular). Similarly, in German, the infinitive, first person plural present, and third person plural present of almost all verbs are identical in form (e.g. "nehmen" "to take", "wir nehmen" "we take", "sie nehmen" "they take").

Syncretism can arise through either phonological or morphological change. In the case of phonological change, endings that were originally distinct come to be pronounced identically, so that their distinctness is lost. Thus in the German case, the infinitive "nehmen" comes from Old High German "neman", the first person plural "nehmen" comes from "nemēm", and the third person plural "nehmen" comes from "nemant". In the case of morphological change, one form simply stops being used and is replaced by the other: this is the case with the Latin example, where the nominative simply displaced the vocative in the third declension.

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