Re: German and Russian adjectives

Neeraj Mathur <neemathur@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> First, the use of a neuter adjective as an adverb is an Indo-European
> artifact, found in Sanskrit and Greek all over the place. As for
> compounding, it is usual in Indo-European to use stem forms in compounds, so
> here again German is preserving an old usage; is the Russian neuter singular
> 'short form' the same as the bare stem? If so, it is also using the old IE
> way (and if not, the neuter singular would be the most natural of the
> inflected forms to use; it was identical to the stem in many athematic
> nouns).

The Russian short forms are -0 (m), -o/-e (n), -a/-ya (f) for the
singular and -y/-i for the plural. The long forms are more complex
and also declined in six cases.

> What is more interesting is this dual-declensional pattern. This is an
> innovation in Germanic; in Old English, for instance, an adjective can
> follow either the strong or the weak declension depending on position.

Careful, this is a different thing. In German, adjectives in
attributive position can follow so-called weak, strong, or mixed
declensions. The details are fairly convoluted and depend on the
combinations of determiners involved. I don't know how close this
is to the Old English pattern.

Russian has nothing like this.

> in IE, for the most part, there is no real distinction between
> nouns and adjectives.

In German and Russian, adjective and noun declensions are different.
Substantivized adjectives still follow the adjective declension,
though.

(German adjective declension must be a nightmare for people beginning
to study the language.)

--
Christian "naddy" Weisgerber naddy@xxxxxxxxxxxx
.

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