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Path: utzoo!linus!philabs!cmcl2!seismo!mcvax!enea!sommar
From: sommar@enea.UUCP (Erland Sommarskog)
Newsgroups: net.nlang
Subject: Inflected languages
Message-ID: <940@enea.UUCP>
Date: Tue, 15-Oct-85 13:21:22 EDT
Article-I.D.: enea.940
Posted: Tue Oct 15 13:21:22 1985
Date-Received: Fri, 18-Oct-85 21:21:38 EDT
References: <518@tjalk.UUCP>
Reply-To: sommar@enea.UUCP (Erland Sommarskog)
Followup-To: net.nlang
Distribution: net
Organization: Enea Data, Sweden
Lines: 78
Keywords: inflection, scand. lang.

In article <518@tjalk.UUCP> dick@tjalk.UUCP (Dick Grune) writes:
>Icelandic is the most inflected of the Germanic languages and
>easily outdoes German (with English and Afrikaans fighting over the
>title of the "least inflected one").

I might have misunderstood what Dick means wirh "inflected" but I like
to argue a little.
I know very little of Afrikaans, but using the same form for "I talk",
"I talked", "I have talked", seems to be a good indication for a low
grade of inflection. But English... I would say that English and Swedish
are on the same level.

As far I understand, inflection mainly concerns verbs, nouns, pronouns and
adjectives. (Slavian languages also inflect numbers, but that's
another story.) Let me compare the languaes.

Verbs
===== 

In English it's                          In Swedish it's   ({ = "a)
  
I     talk    / am   We   talk / are     Jag talar / {r  Vi talar / {r
(Thou talkest / art) You  talk / are     Du  talar / {r  Ni talar / {r
He    talks   / is   They talk / are     Han talar / {r  De talar / {r

As you see, the verb forms are independent of the grammatic person
in Swedish. (It's the same in all tenses.) As far I can see this is 
sign of low grade of inflection.

In one sense Swedish is more inflected: Swedish have one more mode
of the verb. To any form you could add an -s which put the verb in
the passive voice. The passive voice could also be constructed with an 
auxillary verb like in other languages.

Nouns
=====

This concers three things: Genders, cases and deklinations.

English have one gender, Swedish has four. But in Swedish only persons
cab be female or masculine. Things are always neutral or real. The
only differce is between female, masculine and real is the pronoun.
Practically it's like having two genders. You must choose between
"den" or "det". (Compare German: der/die/das).
In this sense Sweidsh is more inflected.

English have one case, Swedish have two; nominative and genetive. But
the Sweidsh genetive is the very much like the English "'s". The genetive
doesn't affect articles. Neither can a preposition impose genetive like
in German.
I would say that the langauges are equal in this sense.

So we come to declinations, i.e. putting things in plural. Here's
no discussion: Englisg have one (-s with some special rules added and
some irregularties like "children"), Swedish have five (5), -ar, -er, -or,
-n and none. (Then we have forgotten about loan words.)

Pronouns
========
The only differnce is that Swedish have one more 3rd per. sing. See
gender above.

Adjectives
==========
Swedish is here somewhat more inflected. In expressions like
"the red house" the adjective has one form for masculine, one
for female/real/neutral and one for plural.

To conclude: I don't want to say that Dave is wrong, but I like to
know what he means.

(Here I talked only about Swedish. Danes and Norwegianshave to talk
for themselves.)

Erland Sommarskog
ENEA DATA Sweden
...!mcvax!enea!sommar