Вопрос 17

Adjectives

Old Germanic Adjectives were declined like nouns.

They fall under the same categories (strong or weak, masculine or feminine or neuter, singular or plural) and have the same number of cases (nominative, genitive, dative, accusative, and instrumental).

Degrees of comparison were formed by means of suffixes -iz, oz; -ista, osta, e.g. Long – lengra – longest.

The difference between the Nouns and the Adjectives was as follows: every Adjective is declension both according to the strong and to the weak declension. Weak declension forms are used when the Adjective is preceded by a demonstrative pronoun or the definite article; they are associated with the meaning of definiteness. In all other contexts forms of the strong declension are used.

Degrees of comparison were formed by means of suffixes –iz, oz; -ista, osta, e.g., long – lengra – longest. The comparatives were declined as strong adjectives; the superlatives rarely took the forms of strong declension and mostly follow the weak declension. Several adjectives have suppletive forms of comparison or were derived from adverbs.

Examples of Adjectives and how they were declined in Gothic (Masculine Gender):

• Strong

Nom. midjis (middle)

Gen. midjis

Dat. midjamma

Instr. midjana

• Weak

Nom. blinda

Gen. blindins

Dat. blindin

Instr. Blindan

Вопрос 18

PRONOUNS

Most pronouns are declined by number, case and gender.

In the plural form most pronouns have only one form for all genders.

Germanic pronouns reserve the dual form (which is specifically for talking about groups of two things, eg "we two" or "you two»).

There were such classes of Pronouns as personal, interrogative, indicative and reflexive in some languages. They had the same categories as Nouns.

For example

1st person

Sing./ Pl. /Dual

Nom. ic, íc/ Wé/ wit

Gen. mín/ Úre/ uncer

Dat. mé/ Ús/ unc

Acc. mec, mé/ úsic, ús/ uncit, unc

Many of the forms above bear strong resemblances to their contemporary English language equivalents: for instance in the genitive case eower became «your», ure became «our», min became «mine».

Вопрос 19

Numerals

Numerals were also a part of nominal group. They were divided into such types as cardinal and ordinal.

We can illustrate them by the examples from Old English: an, twegen, thrie, feower, fif, siex, seofon, eahta, nigon, tien, endleofan, twelf + 10 feower-tien; ty-+ tegund.

Some Numerals had the forms of cases – Nominative, Genitive and Dative.

In Gothic the word AINS (1) was declined as a strong Adjective. Numerals from 4 had no changes.

Ordinary numerals were derived from cardinals with the help of suffixes tjo-to.

The numeral FIRST derived from the preposition fore and got the form fyrst; the number SECOND derived from the word ander.

The cardinal numerals were declined as weak adjectives.

Вопрос 20

The main  grammar categories of Germanic verbs were:

• Tense (Present and Past);

The Germanic verb system carried two innovations over the previous Proto-Indo-European verb system:

Simplification to two tenses: present (also conveying future meaning) and past (sometimes called "preterite" and conveying the meaning of all of the following English forms: "I did, I have done, I had done, I was doing, I have been doing, I had been doing").

Development of a new way of indicating the preterite and past participle, using a dental suffix.

• Person – the 1st, 2nd, 3rd                              

• Number – Singular and Plural (+ Dual in Gothic);

• Voice – Active, Passive, (Medio-passive in Gothic);

• Mood – Indicative, Optative and Imperative.

• Non-Finite Forms – Infinitive and Participles.

Types of Verb

All verbs were divided into:

• Strong,

• Weak,

• Preterite-present,

• Atypical.