Grammatical cases
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Cases are used with Latin and, thanks to politics, found their way into English. I'm asking about cases not tenses... i.e. Ablative, dative, nominative... I want to know exactly what defines them.
I know they are indicative of what sentence structure can be used but I also wonder whether the verb used dictates what case the sentence will be.
I know they are indicative of what sentence structure can be used but I also wonder whether the verb used dictates what case the sentence will be.
Outside of pronouns, no they didn't. At least not insofar as the noun actually changing form.
That might explain a lot... I thought English 'had' cases because the syntax sometimes changes according to the case.
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English is guided by word order, we don't inflect like latin. 'Boy' in subject position (nom in latin) will have the same form in object position (acc in Latin) the boy. so it's the positioning mainly that dictates.
But the question is a little unclear.
With rare exceptions (pronouns), cases were dropped from English in the transition from Middle English to Early Modern English.
Which leads me to ask--why do you want to know?
And I ask that, because cases function entirely different even within two I.E. languages, say Latin and German, than in non-I.E. languages--like Russian or Finnish.
So -- context please?
Learning another language and many instruction books talk about nominative, dative etc. cases and then give examples in English to compare them.
You can identify them in English in terms of construction, but they don't exist in terms of the nouns actually changing form like in some languages.
Do you mean what defines them in another language (as in: what is 'grammatical case' in general'? What is acc, nom, gen, dat, abl, etc?)
Nominative = subject
Accusative = object
Imperative = an order to do something. "See here!"
Vocative = calling someone. "Oi you!"
Is that what you are asking?
Even a Latin sentence won't be in one case as such. Different bits of the sentence will have different cases so that the reader knows what is doing what to whom.
"Senatus populusque Romani"
Senatus and populus are both in the nominative case as both are the subjects of the sentence - "the Senate and the people".
Romani is the genitive (I think), which means "of" - so, Romani means "of Rome".
This means that in a Latin sentence, you can put the words in any order and it still makes sense. "Populusque Romani Senatus" means exactly the same thing.
English is a non-inflected language, which means that meaning is heavily influenced by word order - we don't generally attach bits to words to show whether they are object, subject et al. A sentence like "the green Tom ball kicked" is therefore gibberish.
Regards,
Peter
*Peeps in to see if Ruf is here yet*
With Latin dat/abl, I've always related them to the prepositional phrases in English (to the car, from the church, toward the rear etc), but my Latin is scary at the best of times.
With Latin dat/abl, I've always related them to the prepositional phrases in English (to the car, from the church, toward the rear etc), but my Latin is scary at the best of times.
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There are prepositions in latin (many of tham, actually) that take the accusative. Famously:
Hannibal ante portas!
Cases work quite differently in different languages, and (as Medievalist indicates) they can work very differently in different language families.
As a native speaker of English, you might encounter case discussions with controversial topics. For example:
This is me/I.
People may argue for any of the pronoun forms, and depending on their preference they may use different case saystems to do so.
Latin and other languages related to English apply the nominative case to subject complements, thus people who think that English should do this, too, might argue that "This is I," is correct and "me" is incorrect.
Many languages that rely on word-order, though, have a two-case system - nominative/oblique. So you could argue that English does this, too, and treats subject complements with the oblique case, rather than the nominative. If so, you would expect "me" to be correct, not "I". Since we're used to analysing English in Latin terms, this can lead to strange-seeming situations. For example, "nominative" would no longer be the "default". (See: "Who wants a cookie?" - "Me!!!")
The problem is that English seems to use both systems, though maybe not to the same extent, and that we have - apart from pronouns - nothing much to check it against. No verb endings. Some constructions may make more sense in one system, others in another - but we might be missing the real system. Or it's just messy, and we're imposing regularity for analysis sake (in which case we shouldn't hate the language for not working the way we'd like it to).
There is no easy way to transport cases from one language to another, because there is nothing outside any concrete language to give us any help. We can only measure languages against each other. It's not surprising that attempts to provide a universal frame for that tend to come from transformative grammars (since they tend to believe in language universals). There's case grammat, which posits a deep structure that underlies all languages, where languages then select according the concrete languages requriement:
For example, you have a semantic event structure, such as opening a door with a key. Say, the participants are John (agent), key (instrument), door (object/patient). You assign cases to the situation according to the "universals", and then you describe how language arises through "transformation rules".
So you can have:
John opens the door with the key.
or
The key opens the door.
etc.
Note that the latter, "The key opens the door," involves "agent deletion", and the agent has no place in this sentence. It would be odd to say: "The key opens the door with John." You cannot insert the agent into the instrumental slot.
I'm not that fond of transfromative grammars, but I also don't see much else we can (from a certain point onwards) to compare the case systems in different languages. (This is where I am a relativist; I think there's nothing wrong with assuming a common thought-background that helps you get at the core of the relation between two languages, as long as you remain conscious that your doing it from your own position.)
So what is the evidence for case systems?
1. morphological (different word endings or word forms - in English: pronouns and possessive -'s)
2. Syntax (this one's more complicated, and I won't attempt to explain - try the wikipedia article on absolutive-ergative languages - written from a nominative-accusative point-of-view (which makes sense since it's written in English)).
Apart from that you'll need to make assumptions about a language's semantic base. I'm not aware of any clear-cut consensus on such assumptions, but then comparative linguistics is not really my strongest area.
It's actually senatus populusque romanus. The senate and the Roman people. Romanus is the nominative form of the adjective "Roman".
Romani means of the Roman in the genitive masculine singular. It can in other contexts be nominative masculine plural. Romae means of Rome.
It means And the people, of the Romans, the senate.
que is the enclitic form of and. It ALWAYS goes on the end of the second word, never the first.
You could however say, populus romanus senatusque which would mean the Roman people and senate.
Rufus et Peter or Rufus Peterque. Both mean Rufus and Peter.
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*
* I'm glad I had a quick butcher's on google before responding here!
Twenty minutes ago I might have actually claimed that English has a dative and ablative case but that they're only identifiable by word order and prepositions. That would've been talking ex fundamento meo!
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They are comparing the functions, not the actual cases.
For instance, I can talk about the genitive case, but in English, it's generally taken care of by the use of the preposition of.
Depending on the language you're learning, there's a helpful series of books:
English Grammar for Students of Latin
English Grammar for Students of German,
Etc.
They're all actually pretty helpful.
So what IS a case? Is it an inflection of a noun?
Also, can someone explain this;
"I'm reading a book" - nominative
"I'm reading the book" - accusative
Both have the same sentence structure yet seem to be differences cases...
Also, can someone explain this;
"I'm reading a book" - nominative
"I'm reading the book" - accusative
Both have the same sentence structure yet seem to be differences cases...
Basically, this. But it's a tad more complicated. It's a form that expresses the grammatical function of a noun phrase. Note that the inflection can also include articles determining the noun, or adjectives modifying it.
For example: "the red ball" is a noun phrase. In English, this noun phrase covers all the functions (except for genitive, which adds 's to the noun: "the red ball's"). The functions still exist, but they're not expressed formally. Now, take German:
Der rote Ball (nominative) / Des roten Balls (genitive) / dem roten Ball (dative) / den roten Ball (accusative)
Note that the noun itself doesn't inflect (like in English), but that the adjective differs along nominative/non-nominative lines, and that the article inflects for all cases. (Note that other types of nouns do change inflection (and for yet others articles inflect in more limited ways...), and that there's a tad more variation in the plural (of this noun)... it's complicated.)
It's difficult to define "case", because different languages express it differently, and definitions run risk of either ending up too broad, or too narrow. But basically you can remember, if nouns, adjectives or articles change form according to grammatical function, you have a case system in place. In English, the only clear evidence for case is the possessive 's ("Saxon Genitive"), and pronouns.
This makes no sense at all. Whether you use a definite or indefinite article has nothing to do with case, and case doesn't apply to entire sentences, anyway. If you take the nominative/accusative system for English you get:
"I(nominative)'m reading [a/the book](accusative)."
If there's any logic to the above, it escapes me. Where did you get it from?
Thank you very much for your help.
I got it from an instructional Turkish language book. Their entire concept of the definite versus indefinite article is strange, so it may be a peculiarity of the language.
The example in Turkish is;
Kitap okuyorum - I am reading a book - nominative
Kitabi okuyorum - I am reading the book - accusative
The basic change is that the noun gets a suffix (the p changing to a b isn't about inflection) but I don't think that the rule of adding an i to a noun will change everything to the definite article. There is no particle for a definite article in Turkish.
I am trying to put my understanding together based on English but understanding a new language often depends on your first language so... here I am trying to work it out.
So cases refer to noun phrases rather than an entire sentence?
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Yes. In languages that use grammatical cases, case is used to indicate the noun's function in a sentence.
This remains in English in sentences like "He hit her" and "She hit him". In languages with grammatical case where syntax relies on case rather than word order (even when case is used in English, we still maintain subject-verb-object word order--"Her he hit" isn't idiomatic English), case is even more important.
On edit: Whoops, I see what you're doing is trying to extrapolate from Turkish to English examples. In "I'm reading the book" and "I'm reading a book" in English, "I" is the subject of the sentence and "book" is the object of the sentence.
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Some politicians!
Think of it like this - within a sentence, nouns in different cases can be found.
The nouns within the sentence have case. Using Latin grammar as an example:
The nouns (nominative - because they're the subject of the sentence)
within the sentence (sentence is ablative (which has locative function in Latin) because it's the location of the thing described by the nominative.)
have the verb
case (accusative - because it is the direct object of the verb)
object of verb = recipient of action described by the verb.
I have a cup of tea. The cup is BEING HAD. It is receiving the action, it is the object of the verb. Therefore, it goes in the accusative case.
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In terms of modern English, you need to learn what these things are:
Subject
Object (and the kinds of objects; direct, indirect, object of a proposition).
English no longer has cases except for pronouns.
The subject in English functions pretty much like the nominative case--but nouns no longer change suffixes except for number (singular or plural).
Objects and subjects can be mapped/compared to cases in other languages--but the words will not change suffixes; their function is determined (largely) by word-order.
Languages with cases--like German, or Turkish, or Latin, or Finnish--have nouns who chang suffixes/spelling to indicate their function.
Modern English nouns do no do that.
Subject
Object (and the kinds of objects; direct, indirect, object of a proposition).
English no longer has cases except for pronouns.
The subject in English functions pretty much like the nominative case--but nouns no longer change suffixes except for number (singular or plural).
Objects and subjects can be mapped/compared to cases in other languages--but the words will not change suffixes; their function is determined (largely) by word-order.
Languages with cases--like German, or Turkish, or Latin, or Finnish--have nouns who chang suffixes/spelling to indicate their function.
Modern English nouns do no do that.