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Inflected languages have a freer word order than modern English, an analytic language in which word order identifies the subject and object. [1] [2] As an example, even though both of the following sentences consist of the same words, the meaning is different: [1] "The dog chased a cat." "A cat chased the dog."
The English word case used in this sense comes from the Latin casus, which is derived from the verb cadere, "to fall", from the Proto-Indo-European root ḱh₂d-. [8] The Latin word is a calque of the Greek πτῶσις, ptôsis, lit. "falling, fall". [9] The sense is that all other cases are considered to have "fallen" away from the nominative.
Some common examples of neuter declension are the u-stem nouns and the nouns formed by the suffixes -ātar, -eššar and the suffix for collective nouns -a(i)-. Words derived by common/animate gender roots through neuter suffixes are neuter.
A few 2nd declension nouns, such as vir "man" and puer "boy", lack endings in the nominative and vocative singular. In the 2nd declension, the genitive plural in some words is optionally -um, especially in poetry: [5] [6] deum or deōrum "of the gods", virum or virōrum "of men". Neuter nouns such as bellum "war" have -a in the nominative ...
The grammar of Old English differs greatly from Modern English, predominantly being much more inflected.As a Germanic language, Old English has a morphological system similar to that of the Proto-Germanic reconstruction, retaining many of the inflections thought to have been common in Proto-Indo-European and also including constructions characteristic of the Germanic daughter languages such as ...
Words in one class can sometimes be derived from those in another. This has the potential to give rise to new words. For example, the noun aerobics has given rise to the adjective aerobicized. [3] Words combine to form phrases. A phrase typically serves the same function as a word from some particular word class. [3]
For example, Hund (dog) is a masculine (der) word, so the article changes when used in the accusative case: Ich habe einen Hund. (lit., I have a dog.) In the sentence, "a dog" is in the accusative case as it is the second idea (the object) of the sentence. Some German pronouns also change in the accusative case.
Another example can be found from Ket: [7] fèmba.di, “I am a Tungus” dɨ.fen, “I am standing” In Turkic, and a few Uralic and Australian Aboriginal languages, predicative adjectives and copular complements take affixes that are identical to those used on predicative verbs, but their negation is different. For example, in Turkish: