☛ The ball hit John. (“Ball” is the subject; it occurs before the verb.) In Greek, by contrast, we are able to tell what function nouns play in the sentence not by their place but by the ending that occurs on the noun. This is what we mean by declension*. Greek, unlike English, is a highly inflected language. That means that the reader can tell how a noun functions in a sentence, regardless of where it occurs, simply by its ending. In Greek, nouns are divided into three different classes (called