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Stems ending in *i or *u such as *men-ti-are consonantic (i.e. athematic) because the *i is just the vocalic form of the glide *y, the full grade of the suffix being *-tey-. [note 2] Post-PIE ā was actually *eh₂ in PIE. Among the most common athematic stems are root stems, i-stems, u-stems, eh₂-stems, n-stems, nt-stems, r-stems and s-stems ...
The Spanish and Portuguese termination -o usually denotes the masculine, and is normally changed to feminine by dropping the -o and adding -a. The plural forms are usually -os and -as respectively. Adjectives ending in -ish can be used as collective demonyms (e.g. "the English", "the
Most nouns in English have distinct singular and plural forms. Nouns and most noun phrases can form a possessive construction. Plurality is most commonly shown by the ending-s (or -es), whereas possession is always shown by the enclitic-'s or, for plural forms ending in s, by just an apostrophe. Consider, for example, the forms of the noun girl.
This form exists for all adjectives. For example: the comparative form of sinine 'blue' is sinisem and therefore the periphrastic superlative form is kõige sinisem. There is also a synthetic ("short") superlative form, which is formed by adding -m to the end of the plural partitive case.
Adjectives may be formed by the addition of affixes to a base from another category of words. For example, the noun recreation combines with the suffix -al to form the adjective recreational. Prefixes of this type include a-+ noun (blaze → ablaze) and non-+ noun (stop → non-stop).
Two sets of endings are provided for the primary medio-passive forms (subjunctive and primary indicative) — the central dialects (Indo-Iranian, Greek, Germanic, Balto-Slavic, Albanian, and Armenian) use forms ending in *y, while the peripheral dialects (Italic, Celtic, Hittite, and Tocharian) use forms ending in *r, which are generally ...
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 comparative is formed by adding -er to the base form. For adjectives that end in -r, the comparative is formed by adding -der to the base form instead. The comparative inflects as an adjective in its own right, having inflected and partitive forms. The uninflected comparative can be used as an adverb as well.