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

= 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)


 * 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. -- Jayron 32 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)