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Valthungian: Difference between revisions
→A Note on “Strong” and “Weak” Terminology
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===A Note on “Strong” | ===A Note on Terminology: “Strong” vs. “Weak”=== | ||
In most Germanic languages, nouns, verbs, and adjectives tend to be broken into categories considered “strong” and “weak.” | |||
In verbs, these denote two of the many categories into which verbs may be broken, “strong” verbs being those that form the preterit by means of ablaut, and “weak” being those that form the preterit with a suffix containing some manner of dental consonant. There are further classifications of preterit-present, aorist-present, subjunctive-present, and anomalous, and many of them overlap with the simplistic “strong” and “weak” descriptors. (See [[#Verbs|Verbs]] for more information.) | |||
This usage is completely unrelated to strong and weak nouns and adjectives, in which “weak” means that the words cling to their determiner endings inherited from Proto-Indo-European, which usually have an /n/ inserted between the root and the ending. | |||
And even though the meaning of strong and weak in nouns and adjectives are historically related, their usage is not: In nouns, like the verbs, this is merely a convenient way of categorizing certain types of nouns which take certain endings. In adjectives, however, the use of a strong or weak adjective depends on whether other determiners are present in the same noun phrase; most adjectives have both a strong and a weak declension. | |||
For the purposes of this text, I dispense with the traditional strong and weak categories as relates to nouns and simply relate the various stem classes into which nouns can be classified, based on their inherited Proto-Germanic endings (which include the /n/ infix where applicable). Since these endings can be irregular and each class must be learned by rote anyway, there is no need in the context of the Valthungian language to add this additional arbitrary distinction. I maintain the use of the terms for verbs and adjectives, though, to be honest, their usage with verbs could easily be similarly eschewed; the only area where these distinctions are really functionally important is in the discussion of adjectives. | |||
==Nouns== | ==Nouns== | ||