Old Saxon ( German : altsächsische Sprache ), also known as Old Low German ( German : altniederdeutsche Sprache ), was a Germanic language and the earliest recorded form of Low German (spoken nowadays in Northern Germany , the northeastern Netherlands, southern Denmark, the Americas and parts of Eastern Europe ). It is a West Germanic language, closely related to the Anglo-Frisian languages. It is documented from the 8th century until the 12th century, when it gradually evolved into Middle Low German . It was spoken throughout modern northwestern Germany, primarily in the coastal regions and in the eastern Netherlands by Saxons , a Germanic tribe that inhabited the region of Saxony . It partially shares Anglo-Frisian 's ( Old Frisian , Old English ) Ingvaeonic nasal spirant law which sets it apart from Low Franconian and Irminonic languages, such as Dutch , Luxembourgish and German .
70-444: The grammar of Old Saxon was fully inflected with five grammatical cases ( nominative , accusative , genitive , dative , and instrumental ), three grammatical numbers ( singular , plural , and dual ), and three grammatical genders ( masculine , feminine , and neuter ). The dual forms occurred in the first and second persons only. In the early Middle Ages , a dialect continuum existed between Old Dutch and Old Saxon,
140-427: A consonant, e.g. hēliand ' savior ' ( Old High German : heilant , Old English : hǣlend , but Gothic : háiljands ). Germanic umlaut , when it occurs with short a , is inconsistent, e.g. hebbean or habbian "to have" ( Old English : habban ). This feature was carried over into the descendant-language of Old Saxon, Middle Low German, where e.g. the adjective krank ( ' sick, ill ' ) had
210-512: A continuum which has since been interrupted by the simultaneous dissemination of standard languages within each nation and the dissolution of folk dialects. Although they share some features, a number of differences separate Old Saxon, Old English , and Old Dutch. One such difference is the Old Dutch utilization of -a as its plural a-stem noun ending, while Old Saxon and Old English employ -as or -os . However, it seems that Middle Dutch took
280-516: A given word class is subject to inflection in a particular language, there are generally one or more standard patterns of inflection (the paradigms described below) that words in that class may follow. Words which follow such a standard pattern are said to be regular ; those that inflect differently are called irregular . For instance, many languages that feature verb inflection have both regular verbs and irregular verbs . In English, regular verbs form their past tense and past participle with
350-413: A given situation is often predictable from the phonetic context, with such allophones being called positional variants , but some allophones occur in free variation . Replacing a sound by another allophone of the same phoneme usually does not change the meaning of a word, but the result may sound non-native or even unintelligible. Native speakers of a given language perceive one phoneme in the language as
420-496: A number of different manuscripts whose spelling systems sometimes differ markedly. In this section, only the letters used in normalized versions of the Heliand will be kept, and the sounds modern scholars have traditionally assigned to these letters. Where spelling deviations in other texts may point to significant pronunciation variants, this will be indicated. In general, the spelling of Old Saxon corresponds quite well to that of
490-497: A phoneme must be pronounced using a specific allophone in a specific situation or whether the speaker has the unconscious freedom to choose the allophone that is used. If a specific allophone from a set of allophones that correspond to a phoneme must be selected in a given context, and using a different allophone for a phoneme would cause confusion or make the speaker sound non-native, the allophones are said to be complementary . The allophones then complement each other, and one of them
560-675: A segment is referred to as partial reduplication . Reduplication can serve both derivational and inflectional functions. A few examples are given below: Palancar and Léonard provided an example with Tlatepuzco Chinantec (an Oto-Manguean language spoken in Southern Mexico ), where tones are able to distinguish mood, person, and number: Case can be distinguished with tone as well, as in Maasai language (a Nilo-Saharan language spoken in Kenya and Tanzania ) (Hyman, 2016): Because
630-557: A sentence can consist of a single highly inflected word (such as many Native American languages ) are called polysynthetic languages . Languages in which each inflection conveys only a single grammatical category, such as Finnish , are known as agglutinative languages , while languages in which a single inflection can convey multiple grammatical roles (such as both nominative case and plural, as in Latin and German ) are called fusional . In English most nouns are inflected for number with
700-577: A sentence to be compatible with each other according to the rules of the language is known as concord or agreement . For example, in "the man jumps", "man" is a singular noun, so "jump" is constrained in the present tense to use the third person singular suffix "s". Languages that have some degree of inflection are synthetic languages . They can be highly inflected (such as Georgian or Kichwa ), moderately inflected (such as Russian or Latin ), weakly inflected (such as English ), but not uninflected (such as Chinese ). Languages that are so inflected that
770-449: A separate entry; the same goes for jump and jumped . Languages that add inflectional morphemes to words are sometimes called inflectional languages , which is a synonym for inflected languages . Morphemes may be added in several different ways: Reduplication is a morphological process where a constituent is repeated. The direct repetition of a word or root is called total reduplication (or full reduplication ). The repetition of
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#1732765795499840-473: A set of inflectional endings), where a class of words follow the same pattern. Nominal inflectional paradigms are called declensions , and verbal inflectional paradigms are termed conjugations . For instance, there are five types of Latin declension . Words that belong to the first declension usually end in -a and are usually feminine. These words share a common inflectional framework. In Old English , nouns are divided into two major categories of declension,
910-525: A single distinctive sound and are "both unaware of and even shocked by" the allophone variations that are used to pronounce single phonemes. The term "allophone" was coined by Benjamin Lee Whorf circa 1929. In doing so, he is thought to have placed a cornerstone in consolidating early phoneme theory. The term was popularized by George L. Trager and Bernard Bloch in a 1941 paper on English phonology and went on to become part of standard usage within
980-452: A single phoneme. These descriptions are more sequentially broken down in the next section. Peter Ladefoged , a renowned phonetician , clearly explains the consonant allophones of English in a precise list of statements to illustrate the language behavior. Some of these rules apply to all the consonants of English; the first item on the list deals with consonant length, items 2 through 18 apply to only selected groups of consonants, and
1050-540: A suffix but a clitic , although some linguists argue that it has properties of both. Old Norse was inflected, but modern Swedish , Norwegian , and Danish have lost much of their inflection. Grammatical case has largely died out with the exception of pronouns , just like English. However, adjectives , nouns , determiners and articles still have different forms according to grammatical number and grammatical gender. Danish and Swedish only inflect for two different genders while Norwegian has to some degree retained
1120-418: A verb's tense, mood, aspect, voice, person, or number or a noun's case, gender, or number, rarely affecting the word's meaning or class. Examples of applying inflectional morphemes to words are adding - s to the root dog to form dogs and adding - ed to wait to form waited . In contrast, derivation is the process of adding derivational morphemes , which create a new word from existing words and change
1190-747: Is assimilation , in which a phoneme is to sound more like another phoneme. One example of assimilation is consonant voicing and devoicing , in which voiceless consonants are voiced before and after voiced consonants, and voiced consonants are devoiced before and after voiceless consonants. An allotone is a tonic allophone, such as the neutral tone in Standard Mandarin . There are many allophonic processes in English: lack of plosion, nasal plosion, partial devoicing of sonorants, complete devoicing of sonorants, partial devoicing of obstruents, lengthening and shortening vowels, and retraction. Because
1260-540: Is Modern English, as compared to Old English. In general, languages where deflexion occurs replace inflectional complexity with more rigorous word order , which provides the lost inflectional details. Most Slavic languages and some Indo-Aryan languages are an exception to the general Indo-European deflexion trend, continuing to be highly inflected (in some cases acquiring additional inflectional complexity and grammatical genders , as in Czech & Marathi ). Old English
1330-469: Is also inflected according to case. Its declension is defective , in the sense that it lacks a reflexive form. The following table shows the conjugation of the verb to arrive in the indicative mood : suffixes inflect it for person, number, and tense: The non-finite forms arriv e (bare infinitive), arriv ed (past participle) and arriv ing (gerund/present participle), although not inflected for person or number, can also be regarded as part of
1400-563: Is also simplified in common usage. Afrikaans , recognized as a distinct language in its own right rather than a Dutch dialect only in the early 20th century, has lost almost all inflection. The Romance languages , such as Spanish , Italian , French , Portuguese and especially – with its many cases – Romanian , have more overt inflection than English, especially in verb conjugation . Adjectives, nouns and articles are considerably less inflected than verbs, but they still have different forms according to number and grammatical gender. Latin ,
1470-470: Is an inflection. In contrast, in the English clause "I will lead", the word lead is not inflected for any of person, number, or tense; it is simply the bare form of a verb. The inflected form of a word often contains both one or more free morphemes (a unit of meaning which can stand by itself as a word), and one or more bound morphemes (a unit of meaning which cannot stand alone as a word). For example,
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#17327657954991540-441: Is an invariant item: it never takes a suffix or changes form to signify a different grammatical category. Its categories can be determined only from its context. Languages that seldom make use of inflection, such as English , are said to be analytic . Analytic languages that do not make use of derivational morphemes , such as Standard Chinese , are said to be isolating . Requiring the forms or inflections of more than one word in
1610-545: Is called conjugation , while the inflection of nouns , adjectives , adverbs , etc. can be called declension . An inflection expresses grammatical categories with affixation (such as prefix , suffix , infix , circumfix , and transfix ), apophony (as Indo-European ablaut ), or other modifications. For example, the Latin verb ducam , meaning "I will lead", includes the suffix -am , expressing person (first), number (singular), and tense-mood (future indicative or present subjunctive). The use of this suffix
1680-513: Is given in Old Saxon below as it appears in the Heliand . Inflection In linguistic morphology , inflection (less commonly, inflexion ) is a process of word formation in which a word is modified to express different grammatical categories such as tense , case , voice , aspect , person , number , gender , mood , animacy , and definiteness . The inflection of verbs
1750-449: Is not used in a situation in which the usage of another is standard. For complementary allophones, each allophone is used in a specific phonetic context and may be involved in a phonological process. In other cases, the speaker can freely select from free-variant allophones on personal habit or preference, but free-variant allophones are still selected in the specific context, not the other way around. Another example of an allophone
1820-464: The Greek ἄλλος , állos , 'other' and φωνή , phōnē , 'voice, sound') is one of multiple possible spoken sounds – or phones – used to pronounce a single phoneme in a particular language. For example, in English, the voiceless plosive [ t ] (as in stop [ˈstɒp] ) and the aspirated form [ tʰ ] (as in top [ˈtʰɒp] ) are allophones for
1890-729: The High German consonant shift , and thus preserves stop consonants p , t , k that have been shifted in Old High German to various fricatives and affricates . The Germanic diphthongs ai , au consistently develop into long vowels ē , ō , whereas in Old High German they appear either as ei , ou or ē , ō depending on the following consonant. Old Saxon, alone of the West Germanic languages except for Frisian, consistently preserves Germanic / j / after
1960-780: The Proto-Indo-European language was highly inflected, all of its descendant Indo-European languages , such as Albanian , Armenian , English , German , Ukrainian , Russian , Persian , Kurdish , Italian , Irish , Spanish , French , Hindi , Marathi , Urdu , Bengali , and Nepali , are inflected to a greater or lesser extent. In general, older Indo-European languages such as Latin , Ancient Greek , Old English , Old Norse , Old Church Slavonic and Sanskrit are extensively inflected because of their temporal proximity to Proto-Indo-European. Deflexion has caused modern versions of some Indo-European languages that were previously highly inflected to be much less so; an example
2030-532: The West Germanic branch of Proto-Germanic in the 5th century. However, Old Saxon, even considered as an Ingvaeonic language, is not a pure Ingvaeonic dialect like Old Frisian and Old English, the latter two sharing some other Ingvaeonic characteristics, which Old Saxon lacked. Old Saxon naturally evolved into Middle Low German over the course of the 11th and 12th centuries, with a great shift from Latin to Low German writing happening around 1150, so that
2100-502: The six distinct cases of Proto-Germanic : the nominative , accusative , genitive , dative and (Vestigially in the oldest texts) instrumental . Old Saxon also had three grammatical numbers ( singular , and dual , and plural ) and three grammatical genders ( masculine , feminine , and neuter ). The dual forms occurred in the first and second persons only and referred to groups of exactly two. Old Saxon nouns were inflected in very different ways following their classes. Here are
2170-473: The strong and weak ones, as shown below: The terms "strong declension" and "weak declension" are primarily relevant to well-known dependent-marking languages (such as the Indo-European languages , or Japanese ). In dependent-marking languages, nouns in adpositional (prepositional or postpositional) phrases can carry inflectional morphemes. In head-marking languages , the adpositions can carry
Old Saxon - Misplaced Pages Continue
2240-485: The American structuralist tradition. Whenever a user's speech is vocalized for a given phoneme, it is slightly different from other utterances, even for the same speaker. That has led to some debate over how real and how universal phonemes really are (see phoneme for details). Only some of the variation is significant, by being detectable or perceivable, to speakers. There are two types of allophones, based on whether
2310-512: The English mice , children and women (see English plural ) and the French yeux (the plural of œil , "eye"); and irregular comparative and superlative forms of adjectives or adverbs, such as the English better and best (which correspond to the positive form good or well ). Irregularities can have four basic causes: For more details on some of the considerations that apply to regularly and irregularly inflected forms, see
2380-422: The English language. Despite the march toward regularization, modern English retains traces of its ancestry, with a minority of its words still using inflection by ablaut (sound change, mostly in verbs) and umlaut (a particular type of sound change, mostly in nouns), as well as long-short vowel alternation. For example: For details, see English plural , English verbs , and English irregular verbs . When
2450-422: The English word cars is a noun that is inflected for number , specifically to express the plural; the content morpheme car is unbound because it could stand alone as a word, while the suffix -s is bound because it cannot stand alone as a word. These two morphemes together form the inflected word cars . Words that are never subject to inflection are said to be invariant ; for example, the English verb must
2520-525: The Old Saxon a-stem ending from some Middle Low German dialects, as modern Dutch includes the plural ending -s added to certain words. Another difference is the so-called "unified plural": Old Saxon, like Old Frisian and Old English, has one verb form for all three persons in the plural, whereas Old Dutch retained three distinct forms (reduced to two in Middle Dutch). Old Saxon (or Old Low German) probably evolved primarily from Ingvaeonic dialects in
2590-556: The above four cases to the locative marking them by differences in the use of prepositions. Lithuanian breaks them out of the genitive case , accusative case and locative case by using different postpositions. Dual form is obsolete in standard Latvian and nowadays it is also considered nearly obsolete in standard Lithuanian. For instance, in standard Lithuanian it is normal to say "dvi varnos (plural) – two crows" instead of "dvi varni (dual)". Adjectives, pronouns, and numerals are declined for number, gender, and case to agree with
2660-602: The agglutination in Proto-Uralic . The largest languages are Hungarian , Finnish , and Estonian —all European Union official languages. Uralic inflection is, or is developed from, affixing. Grammatical markers directly added to the word perform the same function as prepositions in English. Almost all words are inflected according to their roles in the sentence: verbs, nouns, pronouns, numerals, adjectives, and some particles. Allophone In phonology , an allophone ( / ˈ æ l ə f oʊ n / ; from
2730-419: The allophones is simple to transcribe, in the sense of not requiring diacritics, that representation is chosen for the phoneme. However, there may be several such allophones, or the linguist may prefer greater precision than that allows. In such cases, a common convention is to use the "elsewhere condition" to decide the allophone that stands for the phoneme. The "elsewhere" allophone is the one that remains once
2800-405: The article on regular and irregular verbs . Two traditional grammatical terms refer to inflections of specific word classes : An organized list of the inflected forms of a given lexeme or root word is called its declension if it is a noun, or its conjugation if it is a verb. Below is the declension of the English pronoun I , which is inflected for case and number. The pronoun who
2870-452: The choice among allophones is seldom under conscious control, few people realize their existence. English-speakers may be unaware of differences between a number of (dialect-dependent) allophones of the phoneme /t/ : In addition, the following allophones of /t/ are found in (at least) some dialects of American(ised) English; However, speakers may become aware of the differences if – for example – they contrast
Old Saxon - Misplaced Pages Continue
2940-405: The comparative forms krenker and kranker . Apart from the e , however, the umlaut is not marked in writing. The table below lists the consonants of Old Saxon. Phonemes written in parentheses represent allophones and are not independent phonemes. Notes: Notes: Notes: Unlike modern English, Old Saxon was an inflected language rich in morphological diversity. It kept five out of
3010-497: The conditions for the others are described by phonological rules. For example, English has both oral and nasal allophones of its vowels. The pattern is that vowels are nasal only before a nasal consonant in the same syllable; elsewhere, they are oral. Therefore, by the "elsewhere" convention, the oral allophones are considered basic, and nasal vowels in English are considered to be allophones of oral phonemes. In other cases, an allophone may be chosen to represent its phoneme because it
3080-417: The conjugation of the verb to arrive . Compound verb forms , such as I have arrived , I had arrived , or I will arrive , can be included also in the conjugation of the verb for didactic purposes, but they are not overt inflections of arrive . The formula for deriving the covert form, in which the relevant inflections do not occur in the main verb, is An inflectional paradigm refers to a pattern (usually
3150-518: The development of the language can be traced from that period. The most striking difference between Middle Low German and Old Saxon is in a feature of speech known as vowel reduction , which took place in most other West Germanic languages and some Scandinavian dialects such as Danish , reducing all unstressed vowels to schwa . Thus, such Old Saxon words like gisprekan ( ' spoken ' ) or dagō ( ' days' ' – gen. pl.) became gesprēken and dāge . Old Saxon did not participate in
3220-426: The distinction. One may notice the (dialect-dependent) allophones of English /l/ such as the (palatal) alveolar "light" [l] of leaf [ˈliːf] as opposed to the velar alveolar "dark" [ɫ] in feel [ˈfiːɫ] found in the U.S. and Southern England. The difference is much more obvious to a Turkish -speaker, for whom /l/ and /ɫ/ are separate phonemes, than to an English speaker, for whom they are allophones of
3290-509: The ending -[e]d . Therefore, verbs like play , arrive and enter are regular, while verbs like sing , keep and go are irregular. Irregular verbs often preserve patterns that were regular in past forms of the language, but which have now become anomalous; in rare cases, there are regular verbs that were irregular in past forms of the language. (For more details see English verbs and English irregular verbs .) Other types of irregular inflected form include irregular plural nouns, such as
3360-471: The endings for dag , ' day ' an a-stem masculine noun: At the end of the Old Saxon period, distinctions between noun classes began to disappear, and endings from one were often transferred to the other declension, and vice versa. This happened to be a large process, and the most common noun classes started to cause the least represented to disappear. As a result, in Middle Low German, only
3430-619: The exception of the teens, which are handled as plural; thus, 102 is dual, but 12 or 127 are not). In addition, in some Slavic languages, such as Polish, word stems are frequently modified by the addition or absence of endings, resulting in consonant and vowel alternation . Modern Standard Arabic (also called Literary Arabic) is an inflected language. It uses a system of independent and suffix pronouns classified by person and number and verbal inflections marking person and number. Suffix pronouns are used as markers of possession and as objects of verbs and prepositions. The tatweel (ـــ) marks where
3500-616: The feminine forms and inflects for three grammatical genders like Icelandic. However, in comparison to Icelandic, there are considerably fewer feminine forms left in the language. In comparison, Icelandic preserves almost all of the inflections of Old Norse and remains heavily inflected. It retains all the grammatical cases from Old Norse and is inflected for number and three different grammatical genders. The dual number forms are however almost completely lost in comparison to Old Norse. Unlike other Germanic languages, nouns are inflected for definiteness in all Scandinavian languages, like in
3570-539: The following case for Norwegian (nynorsk) : Adjectives and participles are also inflected for definiteness in all Scandinavian languages like in Proto-Germanic . Modern German remains moderately inflected, retaining four noun cases, although the genitive started falling into disuse in all but formal writing in Early New High German . The case system of Dutch , simpler than that of German,
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#17327657954993640-442: The former weak n-stem and strong a-stem classes remained. These two noun inflection classes started being added to words not only following the historical belonging of this word, but also following the root of the word. The Old Saxon verb inflection system reflects an intermediate stage between Old English and Old Dutch, and further Old High German. Unlike Old High German and Old Dutch, but similarly to Old English, it did not preserve
3710-421: The future and conditional). Inflection is also present in adjective comparation and word derivation. Declensional endings depend on case (nominative, genitive, dative, accusative, locative, instrumental, vocative), number (singular, dual or plural), gender (masculine, feminine, neuter) and animacy (animate vs inanimate). Unusual in other language families, declension in most Slavic languages also depends on whether
3780-422: The inflection in adpositional phrases. This means that these languages will have inflected adpositions. In Western Apache ( San Carlos dialect), the postposition -ká’ 'on' is inflected for person and number with prefixes: Traditional grammars have specific terms for inflections of nouns and verbs but not for those of adpositions . Inflection is the process of adding inflectional morphemes that modify
3850-510: The inflectional plural affix -s (as in "dog" → "dog- s "), and most English verbs are inflected for tense with the inflectional past tense affix -ed (as in "call" → "call- ed "). English also inflects verbs by affixation to mark the third person singular in the present tense (with -s ), and the present participle (with -ing ). English short adjectives are inflected to mark comparative and superlative forms (with -er and -est respectively). There are eight regular inflectional affixes in
3920-401: The last item deals with the quality of a consonant. These descriptive rules are as follows: There are many examples for allophones in languages other than English. Typically, languages with a small phoneme inventory allow for quite a lot of allophonic variation: examples are Hawaiian and Pirahã . Here are some examples (the links of language names go to the specific article or subsection on
3990-460: The masculine ( أنتم antum and هم hum ), whereas in Lebanese and Syrian Arabic, هم hum is replaced by هنّ hunna . In addition, the system known as ʾIʿrāb places vowel suffixes on each verb, noun, adjective, and adverb, according to its function within a sentence and its relation to surrounding words. The Uralic languages are agglutinative , following from
4060-977: The mother tongue of the Romance languages, was highly inflected; nouns and adjectives had different forms according to seven grammatical cases (including five major ones) with five major patterns of declension, and three genders instead of the two found in most Romance tongues. There were four patterns of conjugation in six tenses, three moods (indicative, subjunctive, imperative, plus the infinitive, participle, gerund, gerundive, and supine) and two voices (passive and active), all overtly expressed by affixes (passive voice forms were periphrastic in three tenses). The Baltic languages are highly inflected. Nouns and adjectives are declined in up to seven overt cases. Additional cases are defined in various covert ways. For example, an inessive case , an illative case , an adessive case and allative case are borrowed from Finnic. Latvian has only one overt locative case but it syncretizes
4130-553: The noun they modify or for which they substitute. Baltic verbs are inflected for tense, mood, aspect, and voice. They agree with the subject in person and number (not in all forms in modern Latvian). All Slavic languages make use of a high degree of inflection, typically having six or seven cases and three genders for nouns and adjectives. However, the overt case system has disappeared almost completely in modern Bulgarian and Macedonian . Most verb tenses and moods are also formed by inflection (however, some are periphrastic , typically
4200-581: The other ancient Germanic languages , such as Old High German or Gothic . Only a few texts survive, predominantly baptismal vows the Saxons were required to perform at the behest of Charlemagne . The only literary texts preserved are Heliand and fragments of the Old Saxon Genesis . There is also: A poetic version of the Lord's Prayer in the form of the traditional Germanic alliterative verse
4270-471: The past indicative and subjunctive ( looked ), an inflected form for the third-person-singular present indicative ( looks ), an inflected form for the present participle ( looking ), and an uninflected form for everything else ( look ). While the English possessive indicator 's (as in "Jennifer's book") is a remnant of the Old English genitive case suffix, it is now considered by syntacticians not to be
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#17327657954994340-399: The phenomenon): Since phonemes are abstractions of speech sounds, not the sounds themselves, they have no direct phonetic transcription . When they are realized without much allophonic variation, a simple broad transcription is used. However, when there are complementary allophones of a phoneme, the allophony becomes significant and things then become more complicated. Often, if only one of
4410-497: The phoneme /t/ , while these two are considered to be different phonemes in some languages such as Central Thai . Similarly, in Spanish , [ d ] (as in dolor [doˈloɾ] ) and [ ð ] (as in nada [ˈnaða] ) are allophones for the phoneme /d/ , while these two are considered to be different phonemes in English (as in the difference between dare and there ). The specific allophone selected in
4480-461: The pronunciations of the following words: A flame that is held in front of the lips while those words are spoken flickers more for the aspirated nitrate than for the unaspirated night rate. The difference can also be felt by holding the hand in front of the lips. For a Mandarin -speaker, for whom /t/ and /tʰ/ are separate phonemes, the English distinction is much more obvious than for an English-speaker, who has learned since childhood to ignore
4550-616: The semantic meaning or the part of speech of the affected word, such as by changing a noun to a verb. Distinctions between verbal moods are mainly indicated by derivational morphemes. Words are rarely listed in dictionaries on the basis of their inflectional morphemes (in which case they would be lexical items). However, they often are listed on the basis of their derivational morphemes. For instance, English dictionaries list readable and readability , words with derivational suffixes, along with their root read . However, no traditional English dictionary lists book as one entry and books as
4620-432: The third weak verb class includes only four verbs (namely libbian , seggian , huggian and hebbian ); it is a remnant of an older and larger class that was kept in Old High German. Old Saxon syntax is mostly different from that of modern English . Some were simply consequences of the greater level of nominal and verbal inflection – e.g., word order was generally freer. In addition: Old Saxon comes down in
4690-446: The three different verb endings in the plural, all featured as -ad (also -iad or -iod following the different verb inflection classes). Like Old Dutch, it had only two classes of weak verb, with only a few relic verbs of the third weak class (namely four verbs: libbian , seggian , huggian and hebbian ). This table sums up all seven Old Saxon strong verb classes and the three weak verb classes: It should be noticed that
4760-511: The verb stem, verb form, noun, or preposition is placed. Arabic regional dialects (e.g. Moroccan Arabic, Egyptian Arabic, Gulf Arabic), used for everyday communication, tend to have less inflection than the more formal Literary Arabic. For example, in Jordanian Arabic, the second- and third-person feminine plurals ( أنتنّ antunna and هنّ hunna ) and their respective unique conjugations are lost and replaced by
4830-462: The word is a noun or an adjective. Slovene and Sorbian languages use a rare third number, (in addition to singular and plural numbers) known as dual (in case of some words dual survived also in Polish and other Slavic languages). Modern Russian, Serbian and Czech also use a more complex form of dual , but this misnomer applies instead to numbers 2, 3, 4, and larger numbers ending in 2, 3, or 4 (with
4900-417: Was a moderately inflected language, using an extensive case system similar to that of modern Icelandic , Faroese or German . Middle and Modern English lost progressively more of the Old English inflectional system. Modern English is considered a weakly inflected language, since its nouns have only vestiges of inflection (plurals, the pronouns), and its regular verbs have only four forms: an inflected form for
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