In linguistics, syncretism is the agreement in form of distinct morphological forms of a word. For example, 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"). Linguistics is the scientific study of human language, and someone who engages in this study is called a linguist. ... Morphology is a subdiscipline of linguistics that studies word structure. ... Latin is an ancient Indo-European language originally spoken in the region around Rome called Latium. ... The nominative case is a grammatical case for a noun. ... The vocative case is the case used for a noun identifying the person being addressed, found in Latin among other languages. ... In grammar, the infinitive is the form of a verb that has no inflection to indicate person, number, mood or tense. ... ... Grammatical person, in linguistics, is used for the grammatical categories a language uses to describe the relationship between the speaker and the persons or things she is talking about. ...

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. The vowels of modern (Standard) Arabic and (Israeli) Hebrew from the phonological point of view. ... The term Old High German (OHG, German: Althochdeutsch) refers to the earliest stage of the German language and it conventionally covers the period from around 500 to 1050. ...

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