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German declension is the paradigm that German uses to define all the ways articles, adjectives and sometimes nouns can change their form to reflect their role in the sentence: subject, object, etc. Declension allows speakers to mark a difference between subjects, direct objects, indirect objects and possessives by changing the form of the word—and/or its associated article—instead of ...
Old High German had a number of indefinite pronominal forms. The following were declined as strong adjectives: sum, sumilīh, sumalīh "a certain one, someone" ein "one" einīg, eining "any, anyone" (in negative polarity sentences) thëhein, dëhein "anyone, any" ("no one, no, none" in negative polarity sentences) nih(h)ein, noh(h)ein "no, none"
A set of declined forms of the same word pattern is called a declension. As in several other ancient Germanic languages, there are five major cases: nominative, accusative, dative, genitive and instrumental. The Nominative case indicated the subject of the sentence, for example: thē kuning means 'the king'. It was also used for direct address.
The strong declension was the declension of the original adjective, with some significant pronominal admixture in the adjective inflection, [17] while the weak declension was formed by replacing the adjective's own declension with n-stem endings identical to those of n-stem nouns.
The grammar of the German language is quite similar to that of the other Germanic languages.Although some features of German grammar, such as the formation of some of the verb forms, resemble those of English, German grammar differs from that of English in that it has, among other things, cases and gender in nouns and a strict verb-second word order in main clauses.
German articles and pronouns in the genitive and dative cases directly indicate the actions of owning and giving without needing additional words (indeed, this is their function), which can make German sentences appear confusing to English-speaking learners.
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 English sentences above, when read without the made-up case suffixes, are confusing. These contrived examples are relatively simple, whereas actual inflected languages have a far more complicated set of declensions, where the suffixes (or prefixes, or infixes ) change depending on the gender of the noun , the quantity of the noun , and ...