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German grammar. German sentence structure is the structure to which the German language adheres. German is an OV (Object-Verb) language. [ 1] Additionally, German, like all west Germanic languages except English, uses V2 word order, though only in independent clauses. In dependent clauses, the finite verb is placed last.
Unlike English, the German language distinguishes adverbs which qualify verbs or adjectives from those which qualify whole sentences. For the latter case, many German adjectives form a special adverb form ending in -erweise, e.g. glücklicherweise "luckily", traurigerweise "sadly" (from Weise = way, manner).
Proto-Germanic (abbreviated PGmc; also called Common Germanic) is the reconstructed proto-language of the Germanic branch of the Indo-European languages . Proto-Germanic eventually developed from pre-Proto-Germanic into three Germanic branches during the fifth century BC to fifth century AD: West Germanic, East Germanic and North Germanic. [ 1]
Proto-Germanic had only two tenses (past and present). The present tense descended from the original PIE present imperfective, although there were a few verbs with a present tense that descended from the aorist, in some cases even the aorist subjunctive (which for athematic verbs was identical to the thematic present).
Abbreviations beginning with N- (generalized glossing prefix for non-, in-, un-) are not listed separately unless they have alternative forms that are included. For example, NPSTnon-past is not listed, as it is composable from N-non- + PSTpast. This convention is grounded in the Leipzig Glossing Rules. [ 2 ]
The following innovations are common to the Ingvaeonic subgroup of the West Germanic languages, which includes English, Frisian, and in a few cases Dutch and Low German, but not High German: The so-called Ingvaeonic nasal spirant law , with loss of /n/ before voiceless fricatives: e.g. *munþ , *gans > Old English mūþ, gōs > "mouth, goose ...
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 ...
Numerals. v. t. e. In linguistics, word order (also known as linear order) is the order of the syntactic constituents of a language. Word order typology studies it from a cross-linguistic perspective, and examines how languages employ different orders. Correlations between orders found in different syntactic sub-domains are also of interest.