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This page pertains to UD version 2.

Variant: alternative form of word

Values: Greek

Variant is used to distinguish word forms that differ only from a formal point of view, but that otherwise share the same lemma and morpholexical features. In Latin this is seen in the possible adoption of Greek case endings for nouns and adjectives.

Greek: Greek morphology

Due their descent from a common ancestor (Proto-Indo-European), Latin and (Ancient) Greek share many similarities, especially with regard to their nominal inflectional paradigms. This was evident also to native speakers at the time, so that it has always been straightforward to adapt words of one language to the inflectional schemes of the other.

In Latin, we observe that, for words of Greek origin, sometimes such affinities have given rise to mixed Greek-Latin paradigms, or to the sporadic use of morphologically Greek forms in an otherwise Latin syntax. We mark these cases with Variant=Greek on top of all other morphological features. Whereas this phenomenon is quite common for nouns, Greek morphology seems not to occur with regard to verbs.

This is different than simply marking words of Greek origin which comply to “regular” Latin inflectional classes: a Variant=Greek form has to deviate from Latin inflectional paradigms and to correspond to a Greek one (on the basis of possibly different transcriptions), so that e.g. acc. basim ‘basis’ from basis does not receive Variant=Greek.

Examples

(nom. = nominative case, acc. = accusative, gen. = genitive; pl. = plural, singular elsewhere; gr. = Greek)


Variant in other languages: [be] [cs] [cu] [de] [koi] [kpv] [la] [lt] [mdf] [myv] [orv] [pl] [ps] [qpm] [ro] [ru] [sl] [uk]