Anybody who did languages in school a few years back ( to put it mildly) will remember all those horrible tables of noun declensions and verb conjugations. Eek!
It's all because of those bloody Romans and blasted Latin. Here's a classic example of what these "highly inflected" languages do to people ... especially the poor and downtrodden ...
It all floods back ... nominatives, vocatives, accusatives, genitives, datives, ablatives, the ablative absolute, imperative moods, subjunctive moods, present indicatives, verbs of fearing, 2nd declension neuter nouns ... crumbs.
Hold on ... just a minute ... Italian, Spanish and French ... they all came to a large extent from Latin. Plus English, and a bit of Welsh ... and the "artificial endings" used in the disgraceful " Literary Welsh" were based on the Latin model. So where have a lot of those endings gone ?
Well, some of it has gone, but not all of it.... but Welsh can be proud of getting rid of nearly all of it! No noun-adjective agreements, no noun declensions ... but .... but .. it does have a pretty horrible affection for those bloody conjugated prepositions ( amdano etc) and it does have quite a lot of verb endings to remember, plus those extra horrible Literary endings too. Plus... it has kept gender, but at least it's only got two of them. Phew !
So, how come a lot of languages can do without all those endings to a greater or lesser extent ?
Well, let's look at it the other way round. You can write the words of most Latin sentence in any order you like, because the word endings tell you so much information about what they mean... you can tell straight away which is the subject, which is the object, what has got thrown , and who has been killed.... so a Latin speaker could work out the whole meaning even if you put the words in a bag and shook them around and tipped them out onto the table in any order.
You can't get away with that in English or French ...
Two hungry dogs ate three fat men.
Three hungry men ate two fat dogs
Two dogs ate three fat hungry men ...... same words every time !
There were an awful lot of students here today.
There were a lot of awful students here today. ..... same words both times !
That ugly lump is Gareth's head.
That lump is ugly Gareth's head.
That ugly head is Gareth's lump.
Ugly Gareth's head is that lump. .............. same words every time.
It's a bit like watching footballers... wherever they are on the pitch, you know their "rôle" in the team by the number on their back.
So .... you can have languages like English and French, where they are far far fewer " markers" to tell you the purpose of each word in the sentence, BUT ... you have to be very careful with word order.
Or .. you can have languages like Latin and Greek ( and Russian for example) where you have more "rules" and "endings" but far more freedom with word order.
I know which I prefer ... just take a look at this Latin pronoun table ... eek