Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
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 the past indicative and subjunctive (looked), an inflected form for the third-person-singular present indicative (looks), an inflected form for the ...
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."
1P k-tįmi REL -land x-įnn go- CERT. MASC nį-y PRES - MASC ya. 1P Ya k-tįmi x-įnn nį-y ya. 1P REL-land go-CERT.MASC PRES-MASC 1P 'I go to my land.' Africa Some Nilo-Saharan languages such as Lugbara are also considered fusional. Loss of fusionality Fusional languages generally tend to lose their inflection over the centuries, some much more quickly than others. Proto-Indo-European was ...
For example, the English prepositional phrase with (his) foot (as in "John kicked the ball with his foot") might be rendered in Russian using a single noun in the instrumental case, or in Ancient Greek as τῷ ποδί (tôi podí, meaning "the foot") with both words (the definite article, and the noun πούς (poús) "foot") changing to ...
Furthermore English is considered to be weakly inflected and comparatively more analytic than most other Indo-European languages. Persian has some features of agglutination, making use of prefixes and suffixes attached to the stems of verbs and nouns, thus making it a synthetic language rather than an analytic one.
A regular English verb has only one principal part, from which all the forms of the verb can be derived.This is the base form or dictionary form.For example, from the base form exist, all the inflected forms of the verb (exist, exists, existed, existing) can be predictably derived.
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 ...
Additionally, English is moderately analytic, and it and Afrikaans can be considered as some of the most analytic of all Indo-European languages. However, they are traditionally analyzed as fusional languages. A related concept is the isolating language, one in which there is only one, or on average close to one, morpheme per word.