Inflection
Conflagration is a grammatical construction used in highly inflected languages to describe a kind of inflection, much like declension and conjugation. Unlike all other forms of inflection, conflagration is somewhat arbitrary, which I will explain below. Inflection is when a word is modified or spelled differently to serve different grammatical functions; in highly inflected languages, a single word can have dozens of forms, while in other languages there might be hardly any forms of that word at all. English is not very inflected, but does sometimes have some, such as for "I/me/my", "him/his/he", or sometimes for plural such as "goose/geese".
Declension is a type of inflection, and is usually a set of ways in which a large group of nouns all inflect the same or similarly. Each grammatical function that a noun can serve is called a "case" -- for example, the subject of the sentence is said to be in the "nominative case", a noun that indicates possession is in the "genitive case".
Latin has six cases: nominative, genitive, dative, ablative, accusative, vocative. Other cases do exist in other languages. A group of nouns will all have the exact same endings in all cases as other nouns. These groups are called "declensions". For example, all words in the first declension of latin will have the accusative forms -am and -as, genitive -ae -arum, and so forth.
Agglutination is when seemingly separate stems or affixes (morphemes) are strung together to form one large word. Agglutination and inflection are considered the two hallmarks of "synthetic languages", or languages that rely more on morphology (stems and affixes) more than than syntax. (Syntax refers to rearranging static words to change their meanings, as opposed to modifying their morphemes. English is an "analytic language", i.e. one that relies more on syntax than morphology). Polysynthesis is where this gets interesting. Polysynthetic languages are languages that are morphological to an extreme; in polysynthetic languages, an very long and complex sentence can be a single word.
The conflagrative case
There is a little-known grammatical case found in polysynthetic languages, much like the locative or ablative, known as the "conflagrative" case. This construction can be found in Ayahuateclha, a now-excinct derivative of the Mayan language family, as well as several extinct languages from all across the globe, descendent of several language families. It no longer exists in modern descendents of these languages, in much the same way that many constructions of Latin have not been passed down into modern-day Italian. The nominative is the subject, the accusative is the direct object, and the conflagrative is used to communicate anything that involves heat, fire, or flame, hence the name "conflagrative", derived of "conflagration". Little is known about them, but based on the disparate evidence and linguistic reconstruction that we have been able to complete, the people who spoke Ayahuateclha are thought to have held the solar diety to be the most powerful of all their gods and the mightiest of celestial objects, and as a result many things involving heat or flame formally received the conflagrative case.
When I say that the use of this case is arbitrary, that is because, while these objects formally received use through the conflagrative case, realistically that is not pragmatic, because the conflagrative only communicates that the noun in question involves flame, heat, or the Sun. As a result, one has to simply guess what function the word has in the sentence (is it the subject? is it possessive? is it a location?) the word is so sacred, that to use a pragmatic case was considered a dishonor to the respective deity. However, it is arbitrary because countless steles have been discovered in which these nouns that are formally stated to be conflagrative are indeed declined as a normal noun.
The conflagration of existing nouns
Most interestingly, this linguistic principle extends beyond mere case declension -- in some disparate languages, it has been discovered that the conflagrative case emerged alongside the worship of a solar diety, and that its use hijacked words that were already established to have been declined in some other certain way. This process, occurring across multiple cultures, has been labeled "conflagration" by baffled linguists.
This has occurred independently across many civilizations regardless of proto-language, and it makes one wonder if there is some element in the collective human unconscious, some instinctual element in our psyche for this grammatical construction, or if perhaps such a deity really does exist.
LieQuest 2024: A Lie Quest of Mythologically Discordian Proportions