Morphological leveling

Morphological alignment is a phenomenon of linguistic morphology, which is to be found especially in historical linguistics. It is generally to the phenomenon that can match different word forms within a Flexionsparadigmas to a particular form of the paradigm. As a result they exhibit syncretism, which are occurrences of the same word forms, each expressing different but some closely related functions and meanings.

The German language has - like most of the West Germanic languages ​​- in the inflection of nouns known in its history as well as in the conjugation of verbs morphological adaptations. An example is the partial disappearance of the Pluralsuffixe in words whose root word in the singular ends in- el or -er. In the nominative, genitive and accusative suffix this has now been replaced by a Nullallomorph ( for example, " the / the / the finger "). Only in the dative case there is still a visible morpheme: " finger -n".

A second example is the formation of the past tense in verbs such as baking, the baked nowadays often than buk. Because today, in German, as in most other West Germanic languages ​​, the conjugation of weak verbs is more common than that of the strong verbs, we tend as much as possible align the shapes of similar conjugations each other. In English, almost all strong verbs have become weak in this way. However, it has in this same way in some small German dialects the past tense asked in asked changed while nowadays in the Netherlands the past tense vroeg (< vragen, " ask " ) instead vraagde even is the only standard form.

• Linguistic morphology