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A nuestra casa? (Spanish) | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Questions About Your Target Languages |  | |
| Andy E Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 7109 days ago 1651 posts - 1939 votes  Speaks: English*, Spanish, French | Message 9 of 9 20 October 2005 at 3:55am | IP Logged | ||
Well strictly speaking we're not talking about productive adjectival agreement with the subject or object since adjectives in English are typically invariant - no gender and they don't change for number. What we're talking about is prononimal agreement with the antecedent (which may be the object or subject e.g. I gave him his book back) which in English only exists in the 3rd-person singular. This distinction by implication extends to the possessive pronouns and adjectives. Old English also had this distinction with the 3rd person singular but the possessive adjectives were in fact the genitive forms of the personal pronouns (e.g. not his book but the book of him). In addition, 1st person and 2nd person possessive adjectives (which were also based on the genitive forms of the personal pronouns) also agreed with the nouns they modified. The loss of gender meant the death of inflection based on the modified noun. Since English is a Germanic language a quick check of the German & Dutch equivalents shows that they also differentiate pronominally in the 3rd person singular (even if masculine & neuter share some forms). It's therefore pretty clear that this is a "Germanic" feature which other members of the family may also exhibit. UPDATE: Gothic and Old Norse also seem to have had pronominal forms of a similar nature. Andy. Edited by Andy E on 20 October 2005 at 9:09am 1 person has voted this message useful |
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