Morphological inflection. (I)   The kind of respelling that occurs because of the syntactic context of a name, which depends on its use in a document, is not common in English. Virtually the only example is the possessive case, which appears as an apostrophe. In the singular it has a following “s,” but in the plural, when the name already ends in “s” the apostrophe appears by itself. Admitedly the plural of a name is even more rare in the records of individuals, than is the possessive case.

Inflection builds on the stem comprised of the morphemes of the root with all its derivational affixes. The derivations, of course, are intended to define new names, but the inflections are intended to preserve the same name. The variation that includes the inflection cannot be considered distinct from the variation without it, as it is the syntactic context of the name that determines the form. Only when it introduces ambiguity, the serendipidous colision of two names, would its edit-distance be given a non-zero value. Thus, in this case the utmost would be done to put the two names in the same name group. Examples are names like Francis and Franz’s. Fortunately such names will often exhibit other features as well that could motivate their being placed in the same group.