2474: Hebrew's (Potential) Accusative Case Sep 20, 2021

Biblical Hebrew uses the suffix -ה (a-) to indicate motion-towards: a common feature of the accusative case, which otherwise is used to mark direct objects. Hebrew already has a direct object marker for definite nouns—‎‎את (es)—but no way to mark indefinite nouns. Historically however, it would seem that this suffix -ה (a-) would have, whether or not the noun was definite. This accusative form was mostly lost with this one lingering use and a few potential vestigial forms in vocabulary, but some have even suggested that on top of that an early variety of Hebrew had a nominative */-u/ ending for subjects, and genitive */-i/ ending for possessives, but there is less evidence here.

2281: Frequentative, Iterative, and Habitual Aspects Mar 15, 2021

There is a general decline in morphology and general grammatical features in English as time goes on. This is by no means universal, but across Indo-European languages this happens not only with words themselves becoming less morphologically complex, but as in the case of the frequentative, habitual and iterative (grammatical) aspects, syntactically simpler. In a nutshell, each of these expressed repeated action, but in different ways, with the frequentative expressing repetition and intensity of action—think 'chatter' [1] from 'chat'—and the iterative aspect signifying repeated action within one instance, such as 'he knocked on the door'. Those two now are generally more dependant on a word's meaning or historical carryover, while the habitual aspect—signalling continual action that may or may not be presently happening e.g. 'Bob runs' (i.e. 'Bob is a runner')—is somewhat productive, and in certain dialects like African American English is extremely productive, relying on the so-called habitual 'be'.

981: New Strong Verbs Aug 16, 2017

Anyone who reads Word Facts often will have heard plenty by now about strong verbs. There are relatively few of these, and they tend to follow the pattern of '-i-, -a-, -u-', but historically there was a great deal more variation, as one can still see with words like 'dive, dove', and 'tear, tore'. Moreover, nearly all of these are Germanic, coming from Old English for the most part, but there are a few words which were historically weak verbs and then became strong verbs. Among them are 'dig, dug' and 'fling, flung'; they happen to be Germanic in origin coincidentally, and the modern strong past tense form is somewhat invented. With those words, as well as others like 'wear, wore', even though they developed different forms than they had originally, they still followed the same patterns of words that they resemble in sound to some extent. Nevertheless, while it is true that English has gained some new strong verbs, more often they are lost; the word 'climb' used to become 'clumb' in the past tense rather than 'climbed' as it is for most people now, but that original form is still used in some parts of Appalachia.