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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 ...
The Old English phoneme /f/ descended in some cases from Proto-Germanic *f, which became [v] between voiced sounds as described above. But /f/ also had another source. In the middle or at the end of words, Old English /f/ was often derived from Proto-Germanic * [β] (also written *ƀ), a fricative allophone of the phoneme *b.
Called ðæt in Old English; now called eth or edh. Derived from the insular form of d with the addition of a cross-bar. Both þ and ð could represent either allophone of /θ/, voiceless [θ] or voiced [ð], but some texts show a tendency to use þ at the start of words and ð in the middle or at the end of a word. [51]
Simlish is a constructed language devised by game designer Will Wright for the Sims game series developed by Electronic Arts.During the development of SimCopter (1996), Wright sought to avoid real-world languages, believing that players would grow to show disdain for repetitive dialogue.
(Note: The situation is complicated somewhat by a later change called second fronting, but this did not affect the standard West Saxon dialect of Old English.) Because strong masculine and neuter nouns have back vowels in plural endings, alternations with /æ/ in the singular vs. /a/ in the plural are common in this noun class:
Some languages, such as English and Spanish, use a periphrastic passive voice; that is, it is not a single word form, but rather a construction making use of other word forms. Specifically, it is made up of a form of the auxiliary verb to be and a past participle of the main verb which carries the lexical content of the predicate.
Old High German antrahho seems to be a combination of ant (cognate of Old English ened) and trahho (cognate of drake), but the OED holds that the conjectured cognate in Old English (unattested *andrake) "has no basis of fact". The word ened likely has a PIE origin, compare Latin anas, Lithuanian antis and Old Greek nēssa ('duck
The grammar of Old English was much more inflected than modern English, combined with freer word order, and was grammatically quite similar in some respects to modern German. The language had demonstrative pronouns, equivalent to this and that, but did not have the definite article the. The Old English period is considered to have evolved into ...