nominalized adjectives

[Macnerd]

I reckon that you know what a nominalized adjective is. But just in case you don't, it's an adjective acting as a noun. In the movie title - the good, the bad & the ugly - good, bad & ugly are nominalized adjectives. They are adjectives acting as nouns.

Der Alte means "the old man". How would one say "the old woman" (other than die alte Frau) or "the old one"? Can alte, or any German adjective for that matter, be any gender - masculine, feminine or neuter? Well... maybe not ALL German adjectives!

I know that German adds suffixes to nouns to change the gender. For example, Lehrer is teacher & Lehrerin is a female teacher.

[kevin]

It is still inflected like an adjective, including by gender: der Alte, die Alte, das Alte. Whether "der Alte" refers to an old man or something else that is old and happens to be grammatically masculine is unclear without context. Basically all of them are just "the old one", except that they are for a specific grammatical gender.

[Macnerd]

That's what I thought.

Participles can act as adjectives & German allows participles to be nominalized.

NEAT!

I'd love to create a conlang. I've incorporated some of German syntax into it. Like the way that the verb goes at the end of a dependent clause & how German splits up perfect tenses with the conjugated verb in verb second position & the participle at the end of the sentence.

[kevin]

German word order should be pretty nice as a model for a conlang with complex grammar.

If it were my conlang I probably wouldn't copy all of it (because I just don't want a conlang to resemble a single base language too closely), but separating word order in dependent clauses from main clauses and using V2 order somewhere certainly feel like concepts that could be interesting for a conlang (or an artlang, specifically - probably not so much for an auxlang).