Developments From Thematic and Athematic Paradigms
Thematic and athematic forms were passed on to the daughter languages of Proto-Indo-European. In the most ancient languages, such as Sanskrit and Ancient Greek, the distinction between athematic and thematic nouns and verbs is preserved. In later languages, the thematic versus athematic distinction in nouns was replaced by distinctions between various thematic ("vowel") and athematic ("consonant") declensions, and athematic verbs are typically regarded as irregular.
As a consequence of such language changes, the distribution of thematic and athematic words differs widely in Indo-European languages. Latin, for example, has only very few athematic verbs, while Sanskrit preserves a large number of these. Greek resembles both Sanskrit and Latin in different respects.
Read more about this topic: Thematic Vowel
Famous quotes containing the words developments and/or paradigms:
“The developments in the North were those loosely embraced in the term modernization and included urbanization, industrialization, and mechanization. While those changes went forward apace, the antebellum South changed comparatively little, clinging to its rural, agricultural, labor-intensive economy and its traditional folk culture.”
—C. Vann Woodward (b. 1908)
“All poetry, as discriminated from the various paradigms of prosody, is prayer.”
—Samuel Beckett (1906–1989)