Tuesday, 24 April 2012

THE ANSWER/DIE ANTWORT - vocabulary


A quick vocabulary note for anyone learning German out there. the Gender for ‘Antwort’ (answer) is feminine despite what one might expect from the suffix containing ‘Wort’ (word), a neutral noun, following the usual grammatical conventions as follows:

die Wörter (pl.) + das Buch = das Wörterbuch
words + book = dictionary

die Woche + das Ende = das Wochenende
week + end = weekend

It seems that ‘die Antwort’ is not an exception, rather it is a word formed of morphemes (http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/morpheme) instead of a compound noun formed of words as we see in the examples above (‘Ant’ is not a word with its own gender.) Therefore instead of taking the gender of ‘Wort’ it has its own gender.

Any German speakers feel free to correct me if this is inaccurate.

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