Imparfait
The imperfect (abbreviated ) is a verb form that combines past tense (reference to a past time) and imperfective aspect (reference to a continuing or repeated event or state). It can have meanings similar to the English "was doing (something)" or "used to do (something)". It contrasts with preterite forms, which refer to a single completed event in the past. Traditionally, the imperfect of languages such as Latin and French is referred to as one of the tenses, although it actually encodes aspectual information in addition to tense (time reference). It may be more precisely called ''past imperfective''. English has no general imperfective and expresses it in different ways. The term "imperfect" in English refers to forms much more commonly called '' past progressive'' or ''past continuous'' (e.g. "was doing" or "were doing"). These are combinations of past tense with specifically continuous or progressive aspect. In German, formerly referred to the simply conjugated past tense ( ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Progressive Aspect
The continuous and progressive aspects (abbreviated and ) are grammatical aspects that express incomplete action ("to do") or state ("to be") in progress at a specific time: they are non-habitual, imperfective aspects. In the grammars of many languages the two terms are used interchangeably. This is also the case with English: a construction such as ''"He is washing"'' may be described either as ''present continuous'' or as ''present progressive''. However, there are certain languages for which two different aspects are distinguished. In Chinese, for example, ''progressive'' aspect denotes a current action, as in "he is getting dressed", while ''continuous'' aspect denotes a current state, as in "he is wearing fine clothes". As with other grammatical categories, the precise semantics of the aspects vary from language to language, and from grammarian to grammarian. For example, some grammars of Turkish count the -iyor form as a present tense; some as a progressive tense; and ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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French Language
French ( or ) is a Romance languages, Romance language of the Indo-European languages, Indo-European family. Like all other Romance languages, it descended from the Vulgar Latin of the Roman Empire. French evolved from Northern Old Gallo-Romance, a descendant of the Latin spoken in Northern Gaul. Its closest relatives are the other langues d'oïl—languages historically spoken in northern France and in southern Belgium, which French (Francien language, Francien) largely supplanted. It was also substratum (linguistics), influenced by native Celtic languages of Northern Roman Gaul and by the Germanic languages, Germanic Frankish language of the post-Roman Franks, Frankish invaders. As a result of French and Belgian colonialism from the 16th century onward, it was introduced to new territories in the Americas, Africa, and Asia, and numerous French-based creole languages, most notably Haitian Creole, were established. A French-speaking person or nation may be referred to as Fra ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Continuous Aspect
The continuous and progressive aspects (list of glossing abbreviations, abbreviated and ) are grammatical aspects that express incomplete action ("to do") or state ("to be") in progress at a specific time: they are non-habitual, imperfective aspect, imperfective aspects. In the grammars of many languages the two terms are used interchangeably. This is also the case with English grammar, English: a construction such as ''"He is washing"'' may be described either as ''present continuous (English), present continuous'' or as ''present progressive''. However, there are certain languages for which two different aspects are distinguished. In Mandarin Chinese, Chinese, for example, ''progressive'' aspect denotes a current action, as in "he is getting dressed", while ''continuous'' aspect denotes a current state, as in "he is wearing fine clothes". As with other grammatical categories, the precise semantics of the aspects vary from language to language, and from grammarian to grammarian ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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List Of Glossing Abbreviations
This article lists common abbreviations for grammatical terms that are used in linguistic interlinear glossing of oral languages in English. The list provides conventional glosses as established by standard inventories of glossing abbreviations such as the Leipzig Glossing Rules, Leipzig Glossing rules, the most widely known standard. Synonymous glosses are listed as alternatives for reference purposes. In a few cases, long and short standard forms are listed, intended for texts where that gloss is rare or uncommon. Conventions * Grammatical abbreviations are generally written in full or small caps to visually distinguish them from the translations of lexical words. For instance, capital or small-cap (frequently abbreviated to ) glosses a grammatical past-tense morpheme, while lower-case 'past' would be a literal translation of a word with that meaning. Similarly, (small) cap might be a locative suffix used in nominal inflections, prototypically indicating direction downward b ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Past Tense
The past tense is a grammatical tense whose function is to place an action or situation in the past. Examples of verbs in the past tense include the English verbs ''sang'', ''went'' and ''washed''. Most languages have a past tense, with some having several types in order to indicate how far back the action took place. Some languages have a compound past tense which uses auxiliary verbs as well as an imperfect tense which expresses continuous or repetitive events or actions. Some languages inflect the verb, which changes the ending to indicate the past tense, while non-inflected languages may use other words meaning, for example, "yesterday" or "last week" to indicate that something took place in the past. Introduction In some languages, the grammatical expression of past tense is combined with the expression of other grammatical category, categories such as grammatical aspect (see tense–aspect). Thus a language may have several types of past tense form, their use depending o ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Preterite
The preterite or preterit ( ; abbreviated or ) is a grammatical tense or verb form serving to denote events that took place or were completed in the past; in some languages, such as Spanish, French, and English, it is equivalent to the simple past tense. In general, it combines the perfective aspect (event viewed as a single whole; it is not to be confused with the similarly named perfect) with the past tense and may thus also be termed the ''perfective past''. In grammars of particular languages the preterite is sometimes called the ''past historic'', or (particularly in the Greek grammatical tradition) the '' aorist''. When the term "preterite" is used in relation to specific languages, it may not correspond precisely to this definition. In English it can be used to refer to the simple past verb form, which sometimes (but not always) expresses perfective aspect. The case of German is similar: the ''Präteritum'' is the simple (non-compound) past tense, which does not always ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Pronoun
In linguistics and grammar, a pronoun (Interlinear gloss, glossed ) is a word or a group of words that one may substitute for a noun or noun phrase. Pronouns have traditionally been regarded as one of the part of speech, parts of speech, but some modern theorists would not consider them to form a single class, in view of the variety of functions they perform cross-linguistically. An example of a pronoun is "you", which can be either singular or plural. Sub-types include personal pronoun, personal and possessive pronouns, reflexive pronoun, reflexive and reciprocal pronoun, reciprocal pronouns, demonstrative pronouns, relative pronoun, relative and interrogative pronouns, and indefinite pronouns. The use of pronouns often involves anaphora (linguistics), anaphora, where the meaning of the pronoun is dependent on an antecedent (grammar), antecedent. For example, in the sentence ''That poor man looks as if he needs a new coat'', the meaning of the pronoun ''he'' is dependent on its ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Rhotacism (sound Change)
Rhotacism ( ) or rhotacization is a sound change that converts one consonant (usually a voiced alveolar consonant: , , , or ) to a rhotic consonant in a certain environment. The most common may be of to . When a dialect or member of a language family resists the change and keeps a sound, this is sometimes known as ''zetacism''. The term comes from the Greek letter ''rho'', denoting . Albanian The southern ( Tosk) dialects, the base of Standard Albanian, changed to , but the northern ( Gheg) dialects did not: * vs. 'the voice' * vs. 'the knee' * vs. 'Albania' * vs. 'Albania' (older name of the country) * vs. 'burnt' * vs. 'wood' * vs. 'did' * vs. 'caught' * vs. 'dust' * vs. 'love' Aramaic In Aramaic, Proto-Semitic ''n'' changed to ''r'' in a few words: * ''bar'' "son" as compared to Hebrew בֵן ''ben'' (from Proto-Semitic *''bnu'') * ''trên'' and ''tartên'' "two" (masculine and feminine form respectively) as compared to Demotic Arabic ''t ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Old Spanish Language
Old Spanish (, , ; ), also known as Old Castilian or Medieval Spanish, refers to the varieties of Ibero-Romance spoken predominantly in Castile and environs during the Middle Ages. The earliest, longest, and most famous literary composition in Old Spanish is the (c. 1140–1207). Phonology Vowels Monophthongs Diphthongs Consonants ( and were apico-alveolar.) and These were still distinct phonemes in Old Spanish, judging by the consistency with which the graphemes and were distinguished. Nevertheless, the two could be confused in consonant clusters (as in ~ “dawn”) or in word-initial position, perhaps after or a pause. and appear to have merged in word-initial position by about 1400 and in all other environments by the mid–late 16th century at the latest. At an archaic stage, the realizations of (from Latin ) would have been approximately as follows: * before or * before or * or before By early Old Spanish, had been replaced with ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Standard Spanish
Standard Spanish, also called the , refers to the standard, or codified, variety of the Spanish language, which most writing and formal speech in Spanish tends to reflect. This standard, like other standard languages, tends to reflect the norms of upper-class, educated speech. There is variation within this standard such that one may speak of the Mexican, Latin American, Peninsular (or European), and Rioplatense standards, in addition to the standard forms developed by international organizations and multinational companies. Development Medieval period The dialect that would become standard Spanish originated in the speech of medieval Burgos and surrounding areas. The traits of Burgos speech began to extend beyond its immediate area due to the military success of the Kingdom of Castile. Crucially, speakers of the Burgos dialect were involved in the 1085 capture of Toledo, which was the traditional old capital of a united peninsular kingdom in the Visigothic era. In th ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Voseo
In Spanish grammar, () is the use of as a grammatical person, second-person grammatical number, singular pronoun, along with its associated verbal forms, in certain regions where the language is spoken. In those regions it replaces , i.e. the use of the pronoun and its verbal forms. can also be found in the context of using verb conjugations for with as the subject pronoun (#Verbal voseo and pronominal voseo, verbal voseo). In all regions with , the corresponding unstressed object pronoun is and the corresponding possessive is . is used extensively as the second-person singular in Rioplatense Spanish (Argentina and Uruguay), Chilean Spanish, Media Luna, Eastern Bolivia, Paraguayan Spanish, and much of Central American Spanish, Central America (El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, Costa Rica); in Mexico, in the southern regions of Chiapas and parts of Oaxaca. It is rarely used, if at all, in places such as Cuba and Puerto Rico. had been traditionally used in ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Hiatus (linguistics)
In phonology, hiatus ( ) or diaeresis ( ; also spelled dieresis or diæresis) describes the occurrence of two separate vowel sounds in adjacent syllables with no intervening consonant. When two vowel sounds instead occur together as part of a single syllable, the result is called a diphthong. Preference Some languages do not have diphthongs, except sometimes in rapid speech, or they have a limited number of diphthongs but also numerous vowel sequences that cannot form diphthongs and so appear in hiatus. That is the case for Nuosu, Bantu languages like Swahili, and Lakota. An example is Swahili 'purify' with three syllables. Avoidance Many languages disallow or restrict hiatus and avoid it by deleting or assimilating the vowel sound or by adding an extra consonant sound. Epenthesis A consonant sound may be added between vowels (epenthesis) to prevent hiatus. That is most often a semivowel or a glottal, but all kinds of other consonants can be used as well, depending on the ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |