From: Miguel Carrasquer
Message: 33895
Date: 2004-08-27
>For the benefit of those who have no idea what I'm talking about:I was referring to the Proto-Germanic paradigms, as
>
>German adjectives in an definite NP in singular
>xxxx m. f. n.
>nom. -e -e -e
>acc. -n -e -e
>gen. -n -n -n
>dat. -n -n -n
>
>German adjectives in an indefinite NP in singular
>xxxx m. f. n.
>nom. -r -e -s
>acc. -n -e -s
>gen. -n -n -n
>dat. -n -n -n
>
>German adjectives in an NP with no initial numeral or demonstrative
>etc (thus beginning with an adjective) in singular
>xxxx m. f. n.
>nom. -r -e -s
>acc. -n -e -s
>gen. -n -r -n
>dat. -m -r -m
>
>Miguel was referring to the two first ones.
>I was referring to theLithuanian also takes a pronominal ending in the dat.sg. of
>last one. But the phenomenon of "taking on the pronominal ending"
>(I've never understood why when I saw that in textbooks; why would a
>noun or adjective want to do that?) is continuing from 1) to 2) and
>from 2) to 3).
>The two endings that "jumped the gun" and encroached upon theThe Old Dutch (OLF) paradigms were:
>adjective before they really had to are m. nom. -r and n. nom.acc. -
>s (I should be writing them -er and -es-; I've left out the /e/'s in
>the tables so that Yahoo would not make a mess out of the columns,
>as it usually does with unequal-length entries). As for the neuter
>-s, it is not used in a certain style in German (Revelation: 'Und
>ich sah ein weiss Ross', not 'weisses', and Dutch has dropped it
>completely 'een oud huis' vs. German 'ein altes Haus'. One gets the
>impression it was introduced recently, exactly for the purpose of
>delimiting the NP. Cf. Dutch 'een oude man' vs. German 'ein alter
>Mann' where Dutch again may drop the -e under circumstances I've
>forgotten.