66-550: A Matica or Matice or Matitsa is a Slavic concept of a foundation which promotes national culture and gained prominence during the 19th-century romantic nationalism . The Slavic words “ matica ” or " matice ” have the same etymological origin as Old French “ matrice ” or Latin “ mātrīx ” and are synonymous with them; in this context, the meaning is similar to the use of the term “ matrice ” in Christianity . The matica structure has been particularly used among
132-516: 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
198-699: A part of interdisciplinary study of Slavic ethnogenesis, a lexicostatistical classification of Slavic languages. It was built using qualitative 110-word Swadesh lists that were compiled according to the standards of the Global Lexicostatistical Database project and processed using modern phylogenetic algorithms. The resulting dated tree complies with the traditional expert views on the Slavic group structure. Kassian-Dybo's tree suggests that Proto-Slavic first diverged into three branches: Eastern, Western and Southern. The Proto-Slavic break-up
264-521: A partial exception of Bulgarian and Macedonian , they have fully developed inflection -based conjugation and declension . In their relational synthesis Slavic languages distinguish between lexical and inflectional suffixes . In all cases, the lexical suffix precedes the inflectional in an agglutination mode. The fusional categorization of Slavic languages is based on grammatic inflectional suffixes alone. Prefixes are also used, particularly for lexical modification of verbs. For example,
330-553: A recent past. Pontic Steppe Caucasus East Asia Eastern Europe Northern Europe Pontic Steppe Northern/Eastern Steppe Europe South Asia Steppe Europe Caucasus India Indo-Aryans Iranians East Asia Europe East Asia Europe Indo-Aryan Iranian Indo-Aryan Iranian Others European Slavic languages descend from Proto-Slavic , their immediate parent language , ultimately deriving from Proto-Indo-European ,
396-675: 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
462-557: 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
528-449: 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
594-473: 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,
660-546: A somewhat unusual feature of virtually free word order in a sentence clause , although subject–verb–object and adjective-before-noun is the preferred order in the neutral style of speech . Modern Bulgarian differs from other Slavic languages, because it almost completely lost declension , it developed definite articles from demonstrative pronouns (similar to "the" from "this" in English ), and it formed indicative and renarrative tenses for verbs . Since
726-540: 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
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#1732772861948792-418: 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
858-456: 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, 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
924-540: 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
990-581: 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 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,
1056-469: 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
1122-563: 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 ,
1188-590: Is better for geographically adjacent languages and in the written (rather than oral) form. At the same time, recent studies of mutual intelligibility between Slavic languages revealed, that their traditional three-branch division does not withstand quantitative scrutiny. While the grouping of Czech , Slovak and Polish into West Slavic turned out to be appropriate, Western South Slavic Serbo-Croatian and Slovene were found to be closer to Czech and Slovak (West Slavic languages) than to Eastern South Slavic Bulgarian . The traditional tripartite division of
1254-451: Is dated to around 100 A.D., which correlates with the archaeological assessment of Slavic population in the early 1st millennium A.D. being spread on a large territory and already not being monolithic. Then, in the 5th and 6th centuries A.D., these three Slavic branches almost simultaneously divided into sub-branches, which corresponds to the fast spread of the Slavs through Eastern Europe and
1320-634: Is thought to have descended from the earlier Proto-Balto-Slavic language , linking the Slavic languages to the Baltic languages in a Balto-Slavic group within the Indo-European family. The current geographical distribution of natively spoken Slavic languages includes the Balkans , Central and Eastern Europe , and all the way from Western Siberia to the Russian Far East . Furthermore,
1386-444: Is within the boundaries of modern Ukraine and Southern Federal District of Russia. The Proto-Slavic language existed until around AD 500. By the 7th century, it had broken apart into large dialectal zones. There are no reliable hypotheses about the nature of the subsequent breakups of West and South Slavic. East Slavic is generally thought to converge to one Old East Slavic language of Kievan Rus , which existed until at least
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#17327728619481452-599: The Latin script , and have had more Western European influence due to their proximity and speakers being historically Roman Catholic , whereas the East Slavic and Eastern South Slavic languages are written in Cyrillic and, with Eastern Orthodox or Uniate faith, have had more Greek influence. Two Slavic languages, Belarusian and Serbo-Croatian , are biscriptal, i.e. written in either alphabet either nowadays or in
1518-780: 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
1584-597: The Rusyn language spoken in Transcarpatian Ukraine and adjacent counties of Slovakia and Ukraine. Similarly, the Croatian Kajkavian dialect is more similar to Slovene than to the standard Croatian language. Modern Russian differs from other Slavic languages in an unusually high percentage of words of non-Slavic origin, particularly of Dutch (e.g. for naval terms introduced during
1650-655: The West Slavic peoples and South Slavic peoples : The term has additionally been used to refer to: Slavic languages The Slavic languages , also known as the Slavonic languages , are Indo-European languages spoken primarily by the Slavic peoples and their descendants. They are thought to descend from a proto-language called Proto-Slavic , spoken during the Early Middle Ages , which in turn
1716-730: The national languages of the countries in which they are predominantly spoken: Russian , Belarusian and Ukrainian (of the East group), Polish , Czech and Slovak (of the West group), Bulgarian and Macedonian (eastern members of the South group), and Serbo-Croatian and Slovene (western members of the South group). In addition, Aleksandr Dulichenko recognizes a number of Slavic microlanguages : both isolated ethnolects and peripheral dialects of more well-established Slavic languages. All Slavic languages have fusional morphology and, with
1782-473: 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
1848-587: The 12th century. Linguistic differentiation was accelerated by the dispersion of the Slavic peoples over a large territory, which in Central Europe exceeded the current extent of Slavic-speaking majorities. Written documents of the 9th, 10th, and 11th centuries already display some local linguistic features. For example, the Freising manuscripts show a language that contains some phonetic and lexical elements peculiar to Slovene dialects (e.g. rhotacism ,
1914-521: The 14th or 15th century, major language differences were not between the regions occupied by modern Belarus, Russia and Ukraine, but rather between the north-west (around modern Velikiy Novgorod and Pskov) and the center (around modern Kyiv , Suzdal , Rostov , Moscow as well as Belarus) of the East Slavic territories. The Old Novgorodian dialect of that time differed from the central East Slavic dialects as well as from all other Slavic languages much more than in later centuries. According to Zaliznyak,
1980-527: The Balkans during the second half of the 1st millennium A.D. (the so-called Slavicization of Europe). The Slovenian language was excluded from the analysis, as both Ljubljana koine and Literary Slovenian show mixed lexical features of Southern and Western Slavic languages (which could possibly indicate the Western Slavic origin of Slovenian, which for a long time was being influenced on the part of
2046-512: 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
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2112-422: 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
2178-411: 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 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
2244-634: The Russian language developed as a convergence of that dialect and the central ones, whereas Ukrainian and Belarusian were continuation of development of the central dialects of East Slavs. Also Russian linguist Sergey Nikolaev, analysing historical development of Slavic dialects' accent system, concluded that a number of other tribes in Kievan Rus came from different Slavic branches and spoke distant Slavic dialects. Inflection In linguistic morphology , inflection (less commonly, inflexion )
2310-536: The Slavic languages does not take into account the spoken dialects of each language. Within the individual Slavic languages, dialects may vary to a lesser degree, as those of Russian, or to a much greater degree, like those of Slovene. In certain cases so-called transitional dialects and hybrid dialects often bridge the gaps between different languages, showing similarities that do not stand out when comparing Slavic literary (i.e. standard) languages. For example, Slovak (West Slavic) and Ukrainian (East Slavic) are bridged by
2376-556: 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
2442-594: The ancestor language of all Indo-European languages , via a Proto-Balto-Slavic stage. During the Proto-Balto-Slavic period a number of exclusive isoglosses in phonology, morphology, lexis, and syntax developed, which makes Slavic and Baltic the closest related of all the Indo-European branches. The secession of the Balto-Slavic dialect ancestral to Proto-Slavic is estimated on archaeological and glottochronological criteria to have occurred sometime in
2508-405: 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
2574-417: 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
2640-676: The diasporas of many Slavic peoples have established isolated minorities of speakers of their languages all over the world. The number of speakers of all Slavic languages together was estimated to be 315 million at the turn of the twenty-first century. It is the largest and most diverse ethno-linguistic group in Europe. The Slavic languages are conventionally (that is, also on the basis of extralinguistic features, such as geography) divided into three subgroups: East , South , and West , which together constitute more than 20 languages. Of these, 10 have at least one million speakers and official status as
2706-509: 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
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2772-486: The equivalent of English "came out" in Russian is "vyshel", where the prefix "vy-" means "out" , the reduced root "-sh" means "come", and the suffix "-el" denotes past tense of masculine gender . The equivalent phrase for a feminine subject is "vyshla". The gender conjugation of verbs , as in the preceding example, is another feature of some Slavic languages rarely found in other language groups. The well-developed fusional grammar allows Slavic languages to have
2838-619: 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
2904-616: 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
2970-539: 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,
3036-571: The following sub-branches: Some linguists speculate that a North Slavic branch has existed as well. The Old Novgorod dialect may have reflected some idiosyncrasies of this group. Although the Slavic languages diverged from a common proto-language later than any other groups of the Indo-European language family , enough differences exist between the any two geographically distant Slavic languages to make spoken communication between such speakers cumbersome. As usually found within other language groups , mutual intelligibility between Slavic languages
3102-627: The forms or inflections of more than one word in 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
3168-421: 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
3234-564: The geographical separation between these two groups, also severing the connection between Slavs in Moravia and Lower Austria ( Moravians ) and those in present-day Styria , Carinthia , East Tyrol in Austria , and in the provinces of modern Slovenia , where the ancestors of the Slovenes settled during first colonization. In September 2015, Alexei Kassian and Anna Dybo published, as
3300-422: 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
3366-510: 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
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#17327728619483432-425: The interwar period, scholars have conventionally divided Slavic languages, on the basis of geographical and genealogical principle, and with the use of the extralinguistic feature of script, into three main branches, that is, East, South, and West (from the vantage of linguistic features alone, there are only two branches of the Slavic languages, namely North and South). These three conventional branches feature some of
3498-443: The last three decades, however, make this view very hard to maintain nowadays, especially when one considers that there was most likely no " Proto-Baltic " language and that West Baltic and East Baltic differ from each other as much as each of them does from Proto-Slavic. The Proto-Slavic language originated in the area of modern Ukraine and Belarus mostly overlapping with the northern part of Indoeuropean Urheimat , which
3564-460: 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
3630-977: 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
3696-476: The neighboring Serbo-Croatian dialects), and the quality Swadesh lists were not yet collected for Slovenian dialects. Because of scarcity or unreliability of data, the study also did not cover the so-called Old Novgordian dialect, the Polabian language and some other Slavic lects. The above Kassian-Dybo's research did not take into account the findings by Russian linguist Andrey Zaliznyak who stated that, until
3762-553: 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
3828-471: 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
3894-423: The period 1500–1000 BCE. A minority of Baltists maintain the view that the Slavic group of languages differs so radically from the neighboring Baltic group ( Lithuanian , Latvian , and the now-extinct Old Prussian ), that they could not have shared a parent language after the breakup of the Proto-Indo-European continuum about five millennia ago. Substantial advances in Balto-Slavic accentology that occurred in
3960-407: The reign of Peter I ), French (for household and culinary terms during the reign of Catherine II ) and German (for medical, scientific and military terminology in the mid-1800's). Another difference between the East, South, and West Slavic branches is in the orthography of the standard languages: West Slavic languages (and Western South Slavic languages – Croatian and Slovene ) are written in
4026-616: 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
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#17327728619484092-630: 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 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
4158-511: 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
4224-658: The word krilatec ). The Freising manuscripts are the first Latin-script continuous text in a Slavic language. The migration of Slavic speakers into the Balkans in the declining centuries of the Byzantine Empire expanded the area of Slavic speech, but the pre-existing writing (notably Greek) survived in this area. The arrival of the Hungarians in Pannonia in the 9th century interposed non-Slavic speakers between South and West Slavs. Frankish conquests completed
4290-462: 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
4356-417: 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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