Professional paper
MORPHOLOGICAL OVERLAPPINGS OF SYSTEMS IN GERMAN AND CROATIAN LANGUAGE
Marinko Pandžić
; Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Mostar
Abstract
Morphological differences between languages, here concretely between
German and Croatian, appear because of differences in systems and therefore
it is extremely important to examine genetic-linguistic any typological
characteristics of their systems. German language belongs to the
West-Germanic group and its most important morphological characteristics
are articles, decreased system of cases, more adjective declinations,
system of strong and weak verbs, etc. On the other hand Croatian
language belongs to South-Slavic group of languages and it inherited a
very developed morphological system of Proto-Slavic language, which
was reduced in its development but without bigger deranging of relations
within declinational and conjugational system. German language belongs
to changeable-analytical languages and the change can be “external”
by suffixes and “internal” by vocal change. Change is not equally developed
in all parts of speech. It is more developed in adjectives than in
nouns, pronouns or verbs. It played a great role in the Croatian language
when forming a morphological system of aspirations for simplifying a
rich Proto-Slavic system which had many declinations and verbal forms.
In that way Croatian preserved little from the old system and it formed
relations in the internal system on the basis of natural and grammatical
gender, two numbers and two verbal aspects. As a result of that system
of seven cases, system of indefinite and definite adjectives and system of
verbal aspects based on the opposition “perfective – imperfective” verbs
were developed. Differences which were identified in this analysis should
help both in overcoming and eliminating differences and mistakes at the
morphological level in both languages.
Keywords
morphological systems; characteristics of language systems; morphological characteristics of languages; nouns; pronouns; adjectives; verbs and verbal aspects
Hrčak ID:
229713
URI
Publication date:
7.12.2011.
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