Diminutive

“ I am a pronominal adjective; behead me and I am personal pronoun; again behead me and I am a verb.
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Three letters there are which may be so arranged,
That three things they can spell you with care,
A nickname quite common,—what all things must have,—
And the home of the lion or bear.
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My whole is a name that belongs to some men,
And is short, if ’tis not very sweet;
Transpose me, and now on the fair sex I’m seen,
When they’re taking a walk in the street.
Transpose me again, and a verb I become,
Which boys must all do to be men ”

“ LESSON I.—NOUNS Nominative and Objective Case
First and Second Declension
VERBS
Three Persons Singular,
Present Indicative
A noun is the name of a thing or person, a verb signifies an action, an adjective a quality as good or bad belonging to a noun. The nominative case is the person who is or may be doing what the verb means; the objective case is the thing or person to which or towards which the action of the verb tends. The verb to be, denoting simple existence, not action, of course is followed by the nominative, not the objective case.
Nouns are masculine, feminine, or neuter. ”

“ Number is the distinction of one from many: there are two numbers, the singular which speaks of one; and the plural which speaks of more than one. Tell me some nouns with their genders and numbers.
Anne. I know that mamma is a noun of the feminine gender and singular number; men is a noun masculine and plural; table is neuter and singular.
Mrs. Harley. Very well. A Pronoun is used to avoid repeating the noun as, Frederic was good, and [Pg 50] he went out. There are four kinds of pronouns. Personal pronouns, as, I, me; thou, thee; he, him; she, her; it: we, us; you; they, them. ”

“ A noun or pronoun used as an attribute complement is in the nominative case. A noun or pronoun following a preposition as the principal word of a phrase is in the objective case. I and he are nominative forms. Me and him are objective forms.
The following sentences are therefore incorrect: It is me; It is him; Me gave the pen to he.
+DEFINITIONS. Person is that modification of a noun or pronoun which denotes the speaker, the one spoken to, or the one spoken of. ”

“ Common nouns ending in o, change it into a to form the feminine; as, son, hijo; daughter, hija. There are some that express their gender by a different word or termination; as, father, padre; mother, madre; bull, toro; cow, vaca; poet, poeta; poetess, poetisa. (See Ollendorff, p. 246.)
Common nouns terminating in an, on, or, add an a to form the feminine; as lion, leon; lioness, leona; shepherd, pastor; shepherdess, pastora.
CASE.
There are two cases, the Nominative and the Objective. The Nominative case expresses the subject of the verb; as, The man gives, El hombre da. ”

“ Whether we say "a good man" or "a bad man," "good men" or "bad men," the words minno and mudjee remain the same. But all the declinable and coalescing adjectives—adjectives which join on, and, as it were, melt into the body of the substantive—take the usual plural inflections, and are governed by the same rules in regard to their use, as the substantive; personal adjectives requiring personal plurals, &c.
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Peculiar circumstances are supposed to exist in order to render the use of the adjective, in this connection with the noun, necessary and proper. ”

“ Hence also se wīf-mann (woman) is masculine.
The gender of most words can be learnt only by practice, and the student should learn each noun with its proper definite article.
Strong and Weak. Weak nouns are those which form their inflections with n, such as se mōna, plural mōnan; sēo sunne, genitive sing. þǣre sunnan. All the others, such as se dæġ, pl. dagas, þæt hūs (house) , gen. sing. þæs hūses, are strong.
Cases. There are four cases, nominative, accusative, dative, and genitive. The acc. is the same as the nom. in all plurals, in the sing. ”

“ RULE III.
When the conjunction disjunctive comes between two nouns, the verb, noun, or pronoun, is of the singular number, because it refers to each of such nouns taken separately: as, “A cold in the head, or a sore eye is a great disadvantage to a lover.”
If singular pronouns, or a noun and pronoun of different persons, be disjunctively connected, the verb must agree with the person which stands nearest to it: as “I or thou art.” “Thou or I am.” “I, thou, or he is,” &c. ”

“ Two circumstances encourage this confusion. 1. The presence of a second verb, which takes the appearance of a governing verb. 2. The omission of a really oblique antecedent or relative. 3. The use of accusative for nominative forms in the case of personal pronouns.
§ 537. The presence of a second verb, &c.—Tell me whom she is. Here tell is made to govern whom, instead of whom being left, as who, to agree with she.
§ 538. The omission, &c.—Tell me whom she is you love. Here the full construction requires a second pronoun—tell me who she is whom you love; or else, tell me her whom you love. ”

“ The first or personal class consists of formed, individual objects, as: a tool, a tree; for these masculine or feminine pronouns are employed. The neuter [Pg 145] pronoun is used when referring to nouns contained in the second or impersonal class of unformed objects, as: water, dust.
Adjectives
Accidence: Adjectives and Numerals In the dialects the practice of forming adjectives denoting material from the substantive by means of the suffix -en is carried out to a much greater extent than in the literary language, as: tinnen pots, glassen bottles, hornen spoons. ”

“ An adjective is aspirated when it agrees with a feminine noun in the nominative or accusative singular, or with a masculine noun in the genitive singular, and in the dative and vocative singular of both genders; also in the nominative plural when the noun ends in a slender consonant: as bó ḃán, a white cow ”

“ It exhibits some curious traits connected with the mode of denoting the masculine and feminine. It is modified to express person and to distinguish living from inanimate masses. It is rendered possessive by a peculiar inflection, and provides particles, under the shape either of prefixes or suffixes, separable or inseparable, by which the actor is distinguished from the object—and all this, without changing its proper substantive character, without putting on the aspect of a pseudo adjective, or a pseudo verb. ”

“ The termination ive, when the accent is on it, is always long, as in hive, except in the two verbs, give, live, and their compounds, giving, living, etc. for the adjective live, as a live animal, has the i long, and rhymes with strive; so have the adjective and adverb, lively and livelily: the noun livelihood follows the same analogy; but the adjective live-long, as the live-long day, has the i short, as in the verb. When the accent is not on the i in this termination, it is always short, as sportive, plaintive, etc. ”

“ NOUN.
Is of one uniform declension in four cases: nominative (subject) ; genitive (possessive) ; dative (indirect objective) ; accusative (direct objective) ; thus—
Every noun in the language follows this declension; i. e. the nominative is changed by a, e, and i to the genitive, dative, and accusative respectively, and s added to each case gives its plural.
(See page 33.)
PRONOUNS.
(a) Personal.
(These follow the declension of nouns, and ol (thou) should be used when a single person is meant.) ”

“ Nowadays we have only one declension and only one inflection for the cases of nouns. That one inflection is ’s for the possessive case. The following is an example of an old declension:
Declension of EAGE, the eye.
Again, in this English, gender did not follow sex, but was poetic and fantastic. Tongue and week were feminine nouns, as they still are in modern German; star and sea, masculine; wife and child, neuter.—In old English there were a great many plural endings, as -as, -an, -u, -a, -o. ”

“ I scratched and called names. Did you ever, after you were grown up, pull a grown-up woman's hair? Did you ever bite a grown-up man? Did you ever call both of them every name you could lay your tongue to? ”

“ But the English doth so only from the sense of the words, without any variation of terminations, except that es or s signifying the feminine gender, is sometimes added to form the plural number of substantives, and the substantive verb is, or the pronouns it, with its inflections, to form the third person singular of verbs, and as and es in some instances, to express the masculine and feminine genders. ”

“ In an interrogative sentence including a Personal Pronoun and a Noun, as, co e am fear sin? if the Noun be restricted in {148}its signification by some other words connected with it, such as the Article, an Adjective, another Noun in the Genitive, or a relative clause, then the Pronoun usually follows the Gender of the Noun, or the Sex of the object signified by the Noun, if the Gender does not correspond to it; as, co e am fear a theid a suas? who is the man that shall ascend? ”

“ And it is this superadded idea of action that superadds to the verb the phenomena of tense, mood, person, and voice; in other words, the phenomena of conjugation.
§ 343. A noun is a word capable of declension only. A {290}verb is a word capable of declension and conjugation also. The fact of verbs being declined as well as conjugated must be remembered. The participle has the declension of a noun adjective, the infinite mood the declension of a noun substantive. Gerunds and supines, in languages where they occur, are only names for certain cases of the verb. ”

“ In the subjoined examples the noun ow, body, is changed to a verb, by [Pg 281] the permutation of the vowel, changing ow to auw, which last takes the letter d before it, when the pronoun is prefixed.
In the translation of these expressions “man” is used as synonymous with person. If the specific term inine, had been introduced in the original, the meaning thereby conveyed would be, in this particular connexion, I am a man with respect to courage &c., in opposition to effeminacy. ”

“ Masculine Nouns.
§ 42. First declension.—To this declension belong all masculine nouns which form their plural in -e only. It includes: (a) the old masculine a-stems; (b) the old masculine wa-stems which lost their final -w after long vowels in OHG., as sē, sea, gen. sēwes, pl. sēwe, and similarly bū, dwelling, rē (also neuter) , corpse, snē, snow, see § 36; and (c) the old masculine i-stems which could not have umlaut in the plural (§ 44) .
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On the interchange between fortis and lenis, as in tac, day, lop, praise, sant, sand, hof, court, gen. tages, lobes, sandes, hoves, see § 33. ”

“ Those adjectives whereof the characteristic vowel is small, may be called Adjectives of the second declension.
Example of Adjectives of the First Declension.
Formation of the Cases of Adjectives of the First Declension.
Singular.
Nominative. The feminine gender is, in termination, like the masculine.
The other cases, both mas. and fem., are formed from the nominative, according to the rules already given for forming the cases of nouns of the first declension. Take the following examples in adjectives:—
Genitive.—General rule. Marbh dead, g. s. m. mhairbh, f. mairbhe; dubh black, g. s. m. ”

“ The verb is, when contracted, sometimes gives to its nominative the same form as that of the possessive case, it not being always spaced off for distinction, as it may be; as,
"A wit's a feather, and a chief a rod;
An honest man's the noblest work of God."
—Pope, on Man, Ep. iv, l. 247.
OBS. 24.—As the objective case of nouns is to be distinguished from the nominative, only by the sense, relation, and position, of words in a sentence, the learner must acquire a habit of attending to these several things. ”

“ In the pronoun we find often a much more rigid adherence to the series of three persons than the one that we apply, in so far as the distinction is carried through in the pronominal plural and in the demonstrative. ”

“ The personal pronouns, whether nominative or accusative, always come after the yerb; as, molann sé ṫú, he praises you.
533. The disjunctive forms of the personal pronouns are used immediately after the verb IS in any of its forms expressed or understood; as, is é an fear láidir é. He is a strong man. An é a fuair é? Was it he who found it? Naċ í d’ inġean í? Is she not your daughter?
534. A personal pronoun which stands for a sentence, or part of a sentence, is third person singular, masculine gender. An rud aduḃairt mé, is é adeirim arís. ”

“ The nominative and the objective case of a noun are always alike in form. In some pronouns, however, there is a difference (as,—I, me; he, him) .
Declension of Nouns 87. The inflection of a substantive is called its declension. To decline a noun is to give its case-forms in order, first in the singular number and then in the plural. ”

“ Write side by side the declension of domina, dominus, and pīlum. A comparison of the forms will lead to the following rules, which are of great importance because they apply to all five declensions:
a. The vocative, with a single exception (see § 73. b) , is like the nominative. That is, the vocative singular is like the nominative singular, and the vocative plural is like the nominative plural.
b. The nominative, accusative, and vocative of neuter nouns are alike, and in the plural end in -a.
c. The accusative singular of masculines and feminines ends in -m and the accusative plural in -s. ”

“ As words increase in syllables, the more easily is their accent known. Nouns sometimes acquire a syllable by becoming plural; adjectives increase a syllable by being compared; and verbs by altering their tense, or becoming participles: adjectives becomes adverbs, by adding ly to them; and preposititions precede nouns or verbs without altering the accent of the word to which they are prefixed: so that when once the accent of dissyllables is known, those polysyllables, whose terminations are perfectly English, have likewise their accent invariably settled. ”