> gerund: a form that is derived from a verb but that functions as a noun, in English ending in -ing, e.g., asking in do you mind my asking you?.
- a gerund form which is always the same as the infinitive,
- a different gerund form (verb-'ung', kind of cognate to verb-'ing', both derived from a Latin construct I believe), and
- a present participle
...in addition to the other declensions. It's fascinating to me how Dutch and English can be seen as two parallel derivatives of the old High German language, where as what we now call German has developed along a largely different path!
It's also interesting to think of how to describe the semantic difference between the -en and -ung nouns when both do exist. I think one case is that the -ung can often describe the result of completing the action of the verb or in some sense refer to a "complete instance" or "complete occasion" of the verb's action, but this is generalizing from just a few examples...
> forms nouns from verbs, usually describing either an event in which an action is carried out, or the result of that action.
> Note that the -ung suffixed form is different from the gerund which is formed by simply capitalizing the first letter of the verb. The gerund usually refers to the activity in general rather than a specific instance or result.
I tried this to get all of the dictionary pairs for comparison:
import re
german = set(open("/usr/share/dict/ngerman").read().split())
english = set(open("/usr/share/dict/words").read().split())
tech_de = "ung"
gerund_de = "en"
tech_en = "tion"
gerund_en = "ting"
for word in sorted(list(german)):
if word[0].isupper() and word.endswith(tech_de):
gerund = re.sub(tech_de + "$", gerund_de, word)
if gerund in german:
print(word, gerund)
print()
for word in sorted(list(english)):
if word[0].islower() and word.endswith(tech_en):
gerund = re.sub(tech_en + "$", gerund_en, word)
if gerund in english:
print(word, gerund)
I put a sample output of this up at https://sethschoen.com/gerund-comparison.txt in case anyone wants to look at it (not promising to keep it there forever!). (Note the default character encoding from the web server is wrong so you may have to change encodings manually, or download the file and reopen it, to see German umlaut characters correctly.)