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two-morphemic. Many notional words, mostly nouns, lost their
suffixes, so they had only a root and an ending.
1.2 The grammatical system. Like many old IELs the old GLs
had a well-developed system of grammatical affixes. Thus, the
old GLs had a number of noun declensions, verb conjugations
and so on. However, there are some grammatical features which
are typical only for old GLs: the weak declension of the
adjectives which has always been marked by the suffix -n-; the
weak declension marked the definitiveness of the nouns; the
weak conjugation of the verbs.
Substantive
1) vocalic stems a, o, i, u formed strong declension;
2) n-stem formed the paradigm of weak declension;
3) s/r–stems;
4) root-stem nouns which had never had any stem suffix,
the root and the stem in these words always coinsice.
In OE, as well as in other GLs, except Gothic, the substantives
had two essential parts, because of the stem-suffix having lost its
own meaning and united with the case inflexion and could be no
longer identified.
Adjective
In GLs adjective declension is represented by
1) strong declension which is a combination of substantival
and pronominal endings;
2) weak declension which reflected the declension of n-stem
substantives.
Adjective declension in all GLs has no parallel with other IE
languages.
Verb
The system of verbs of all GLs consisted of 3 types:
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