Online Resource Reference Page

On this page I will begin to compile online resources for the study of languages:



High UsageVocabulary

Arabic:
http://www.arabicpod101.com/arabic-word-lists/?page=1
http://www.linguanaut.com/english_arabic.htm
English:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Most_common_words_in_English
Spanish:
http://www.vistawide.com/spanish/top_100_spanish_words.htm

Alphabet:
http://www.omniglot.com/writing/hindi.htm

Word Origins and Etymologies:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_English_words_of_Persian_origin
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_French_words_of_Arabic_origin
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Arabic_loanwords_in_English
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_language_influences_in_English
http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Appendix:List_of_Proto-Indo-European_roots
http://grammar.about.com/od/words/a/historytimeline.htm


About the language:

Swedish:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swedish_language#History

Grammatical Case in European Languages

The Latin language itself is an excellent resource to understanding basic concepts of language.  One fundamental aspect of language that Latin illustrates in particular is the concept of grammatical case.  Every language must somehow express grammatical case in order to form the simplest of sentences.

Contemporary European languages primarily use word order to indicate case.  They also rely from time to time on inflections or suffixes to indicate case.  In Latin, however, case is indicated entirely through inflections.  Because the grammatical case of each noun and adjective in Latin must be identified with an inflection, understanding grammatical case completely is essential to understanding Latin.   

In the following English example, the grammatical case of each noun is expressed by word order.  Word order establishes the subject as the cow and the object as the circle: 

The cow is in the circle.

If the nouns in “the cow is in the circle” were switched to “the circle is in the cow,” the meaning of the phrase is completely changed.  The subject is now the object of the sentence.  That is grammatical case at work. 

However, languages such as German and especially Latin make use of inflections rather than sentence order primarily to express grammatical case, and as such the rules on word order are much looser.  In the case of Latin they are almost non-existent.  Just by adding a suffix to one of the nouns, the subject and object can be identified.  “The cow is in the circle” might be said like this in Latin:  ‘circle(obj), cow is in’ or even ‘in cow is circle(obj).  In these examples, “(obj)” substitutes for a suffix which informs that the noun is the object.  It is word order in English which establishes the grammatical case of the circle; that it is the circle that the cow is in, when someone says the cow is in the circle.  Suffixes, or inflections can define the grammatical case just as easily. 

In fact, the genitive case can be expressed in English by both word order and inflection: 

‘the car of the man’

or

‘the man's car’

This chart I picked up helps conceptualise further what grammatical cases are and how they are expressed in English and Latin:

source: http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Latin/Lesson_2

This is a good quick look at Latin grammatical case and noun declension:
http://www.math.osu.edu/~econrad/lang/ln.html

This extensive article is excellent in its presentation of grammatical case and how nouns in Latin are inflected to show their case:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latin_declension

This five page series looks at the 5 declensions of nouns in depth:

http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Appendix:Latin_first_declension

This article looks at declination of adjectives
http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Latin/Lesson_1-Nominative#Adjectives_in_Latin

This online grammar study book is excellent as an introduction to Latin and Language concepts itself.

http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Latin/Lesson_1

The Indefinite Article: "a" and "an" in 10 European Languages

 The following table shows how to write "a" and "an" in 10 languages of the Latin and Germanic families:

Table of Indefinite Articles in 10 languages - click to enlarge

Notes:
-"a" and "an" is highly similar phonetically in each of these languages: vowel+N.
-French as well as the Iberian languages (Spanish and Portuguese) stand out grammatically as requiring the indefinite pronoun for plural nouns, whereas in the remainder of the languages such is always implied


Next post: Vocabulary in 10+ languages.

This post:  The indefinite article: "a, an" in English, French, German, Dutch, Danish, Swedish, French, Italian, Spanish and Portuguese.

The Definite Article: "The" in 10 European Languages

 The following table shows how to write "the" in 10 languages of the Latin and Germanic families:

Table of Definite Articles in 10 languages - click to enlarge

In the example, I chose the noun "circle" to demonstrate the masculine definite article because its gender is masculine in all the languages on the chart.  "Cow" is the female example, and "hotel" demonstrates the neuter for the Germanic languages (it happens to be a masculine noun in the Latin languages)    

Notes:
-Strong Phonetic similarities within Germanic and Latin language groups
-Similarity of grammar across Latin-based languages; masculine and feminine definite articles
-German definite article has 3 singular forms, masc fem and neut.
-Dutch and the Norse languages (Danish and Swedish) have "common" and neuter definite articles


Next post: The indefinite article: "a," "an" in 10 languages.

This post:  The definite article: "the" in English, French, German, Dutch, Danish, Swedish, French, Italian, Spanish and Portuguese.