User:Austronesier/IE typology

Grammar

 * Proto-Indo-European was a fusional language, which means it expressed grammatical categories like person, tense, aspect, and mood on verbs and case and number on nouns and adjectives by means of affixes, with a high degree of fusion. This feature has been retained in many modern Indo-European languages, although in some of its branches, there is a tendency towards a more analytic structure. E.g., many Germanic and Romance languages indicate case by means of prepositions, while some Germanic languages have reduced person marking (English), or have given it up completely (e.g. Danish, Swedish).
 * Proto-Indo-European had nominative–accusative alignment in case marking on nouns and person agreement on verbs. This pattern is preserved in the majority of Indo-European languages. Some Indo-Iranian languages have shifted to ergative–absolutive alignment, e.g. the Kurdish languages and Hindi–Urdu.
 * Proto-Indo-European did not distinguish clusivity, a feature found in ca. 1/3 of the world's languages, which have distinct pronouns for first person plural inclusive "we (including the person spoken to)" (= "I, you (and others)") and exclusive "we (excluding the person spoken to)" (= "I and others"). A few Indo-Aryan languages (e.g. Marathi, Gujarati) have developed an inclusive/exclusive-distinction, most probably through influence from Dravidian languages.
 * Proto-Indo-European had grammatical gender with three gender categories (feminine, masculine, neuter). Gender was marked on nouns, pronouns and adjectives, but (unlike in Semitic languages) not on person-marked verb forms. This gender distinction is mostly preserved in modern IE languages, but often reduced to two categories (feminine/masculine e.g. in Romance and Indo-Aryan languages; common/neuter e.g. in Dutch and Danish). English has lost gender marking on nouns and adjective and shifted from grammatical gender to natural gender marking of pronouns, whereas Indo-Aryan languages like Hindi–Urdu have retained gender marking of nouns and adjectives, but do not distinguish gender on pronouns.