Your name in ... ROHIRRIC! - The Barrow-Downs Discussion Forum

littlemanpoet · 04-14-2007, 02:13 PM

The thing about English is that it has become so bastardized with borrowings in turn from Viking Danish, Norman French, then Parisian French, then Latin and Greek, that it has ceased to be an inflected language, often rendering cases such as genitive and dative at least partially obsolete.

There are three types of language:

aglutinative, inflectional, and analytical.

Aglutinative is a language in which case is derived by means of changes within the word (I can't give you any examples).

Inflectional derives cases by means of suffixes and prefixes (Latin, old Germanic).

Analytical derives cases by means of helping words, which is how English mostly functions these days.

All that by way of saying that you won't find "s" endings on English names to denote male singular.

(I hope I didn't just confuse everybody.)

04-14-2007, 02:13 PM	#34
littlemanpoet Itinerant Songster Join Date: Jan 2002 Location: The Edge of Faerie Posts: 7,066	The thing about English is that it has become so bastardized with borrowings in turn from Viking Danish, Norman French, then Parisian French, then Latin and Greek, that it has ceased to be an inflected language, often rendering cases such as genitive and dative at least partially obsolete. There are three types of language: aglutinative, inflectional, and analytical. Aglutinative is a language in which case is derived by means of changes within the word (I can't give you any examples). Inflectional derives cases by means of suffixes and prefixes (Latin, old Germanic). Analytical derives cases by means of helping words, which is how English mostly functions these days. All that by way of saying that you won't find "s" endings on English names to denote male singular. (I hope I didn't just confuse everybody.)