Case in traditional grammar The western tradition of describing case systems can be traced back to the Greeks. Ancient Greek, like the other “older” Indo-European languages, was a fusional inflecting language in which case marking could not be sepa­rated from number marking, where there was also some fusion of the stem and inflection, and where […]

1.1. Grimm’s law Grimm’s Law presents a principle of relationships in Indo-European languages, which was first formulated by Jakob Grimm in 1822. The first sound shift, affecting both English and German, was from the early phonetic positions documented in the ancient, or classical, Indo-European languages (Sanskrit, Greek, Latin) to those still evident in the Low […]

The Gerund is the most specific non-finite form of the verb in the Eng­lish language. The formal sign of the Gerund is wholly homonymous with that of Participle I: it is the suffix -ing added to its grammatically leading element. Whereas the Infinitive and the Participles are forms typical of all modern Indo-European languages, the […]