Inflected Preposition

In some languages, an inflected preposition, or conjugated preposition, is a word formed from the contraction of a preposition with a personal pronoun. For instance, in Scottish Gaelic, to say "before him," one can not say *ro e, but roimhe (/rɔʲə/), which historically developed from a fusion of pronoun and preposition. Conjugated prepositions are commonly reanalysed as inflected words by native speakers and by traditional grammar.

Inflected prepositions are found in the Insular Celtic languages (Scottish Gaelic, Irish, Manx, Welsh, Cornish and Breton) and in many Semitic languages including Hebrew (לי li "to me") and Arabic.

Languages that do not have full paradigms of inflected prepositions may allow contraction of prepositions and pronouns to a more limited extent. In Polish, for instance, a handful of common prepositions allow amalgamated forms (in formal registers) with 3rd person pronouns: na niego ("on him/it") → nań. However, these contracted forms are very archaic and rarely heard in daily speech.

The term prepositional pronoun is also used sometimes for inflected preposition, but this may cause confusion with another sense of this expression. (See prepositional pronoun.)