Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2022 November 17

Welcome to the Wikipedia Language Reference Desk Archives
The page you are currently viewing is a transcluded archive page. While you can leave answers for any questions shown below, please ask new questions on one of the current reference desk pages.

November 17

Dictionary form

In some languages, dictionary form of verbs is not its infinitive, such as Hungarian, where it is indefinite present indicative third person singular. But is there any nominative-accusative not marked nominative language where dictionary form of nouns is not the nominative singular? --40bus (talk) 16:37, 17 November 2022 (UTC)

There are languages where there is no proper grammatical difference between nouns in the singular and plural, anyway. 惑乱 Wakuran (talk) 16:39, 17 November 2022 (UTC)

In those languages, you can't say a form is not singular. – Any of them with cases? —Tamfang (talk) 01:49, 25 November 2022 (UTC)

@40bus: In Old French, the dictionary form is the accusative singular, not the nominative singular. —Mahāgaja · talk 11:55, 18 November 2022 (UTC)

According to Bernard Comrie's "Language Universals and Linguistic Typology" (2nd. edition), in Mojave Yuman languages, "the accusative has no suffix", while the nominative has a -č suffix. Don't know if there are any dictionaries. AnonMoos (talk) 23:13, 19 November 2022 (UTC)

May I comment that in some languages, infinitives don't exist at all; Albanian and Arabic, to name a couple. --2001:BF8:200:396:FD1F:2F7:94C9:FCED (talk) 14:50, 22 November 2022 (UTC)

Neither in English really. English uses the "plain form" of the verb to play the role of an infinitive, but the plain form plays a lot of roles in English grammar; English mostly lacks a single verb form that is exclusively the infinitive form; this is different from languages like French (-re, -er, -ir) or German (-en) that uses a distinct morpheme to indicate the infinitive. English used to use an -an ending, similar to how German has -en, but it dropped this in the transition away from old Anglo-Saxon to modern English. --Jayron32 15:14, 22 November 2022 (UTC)

There's the verb "be" with a proper infinitive form, but I guess that might be the only true example remaining. 惑乱 Wakuran (talk) 03:36, 24 November 2022 (UTC)

Disuse of infinitives is a feature of the Balkan sprachbund. —Tamfang (talk) 01:49, 25 November 2022 (UTC)