14 messages over 2 pages: 1 2
Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6597 days ago 9753 posts - 15779 votes 4 sounds Speaks: Russian*, English, FinnishC1, Latin, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Danish, Romanian, Polish, Belarusian, Ukrainian, Croatian, Slovenian, Catalan, Czech, Galician, Dutch, Swedish
| Message 9 of 14 25 January 2007 at 2:57pm | IP Logged |
What Chung posted is also true for Russian (some endings are different of course, but it's not important), except that in Russian female nouns can also be animate and inanimate.
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| Selina14 Newbie United States Joined 6567 days ago 8 posts - 8 votes Studies: German
| Message 10 of 14 25 July 2007 at 11:34am | IP Logged |
In German the nominative masculine article is Der and the 3rd person pronoun is Ihn, but in the accusative the article is den and the pronoun is ihn.
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| karuna Triglot Groupie United States Joined 6334 days ago 47 posts - 46 votes 2 sounds Speaks: Latvian*, Russian, English Studies: Spanish, Japanese
| Message 11 of 14 25 July 2007 at 3:03pm | IP Logged |
Linguamor wrote:
An interesting observation about Indo-European languages is that for neuter nouns, pronouns, etc., the nominative and accusative cases are always the same. This can even be seen in English.
He - him, she - her, it - it.
Is anyone aware of any counterexamples?
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Not true for Latvian.
It: tas (nom.), to (acc.)
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| telephos Triglot Newbie Canada Joined 6267 days ago 29 posts - 31 votes Speaks: French*, EnglishC2, Russian Studies: Norwegian, Ancient Greek
| Message 12 of 14 28 September 2007 at 11:25pm | IP Logged |
When I studied Latin in high school, my teacher said that, in Indo-European, neuter words only had the accusative case. When people felt the need to give a full declension to neuter nouns, the nominative case was set identical to the accusative and the other forms taken from the masculine gender.
This rules applies in Latin, Greek and German.
It holds for Russian with two exceptions:
- The 3rd person pronoun, nominative оно, accusative его. We explain this by saying that the neuter gender followed the general merger of accusative and genitive in all personal pronouns.
- The accusative plural of animate neuters. E.g. лицо (when it means "character" and not "face"), nominative-accusative singular лицо, nominative plural лица, accusative-genitive plural лиц. We explain this by saying that in all animate nouns accusative and genitive have merged and that this merger was indifferent to gender.
If the rule is true, are there explanations for exceptions in other Indo-European languages?
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| Evita Tetraglot Senior Member Latvia learnlatvian.info Joined 6552 days ago 734 posts - 1036 votes Speaks: Latvian*, English, German, Russian Studies: Korean, Finnish
| Message 13 of 14 08 May 2008 at 7:52am | IP Logged |
karuna wrote:
Not true for Latvian.
It: tas (nom.), to (acc.)
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I think it doesn't apply because Latvian doesn't have a neuter gender. 'tas' is a masculine pronoun.
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| Makrasiroutioun Quadrilingual Heptaglot Senior Member Canada infowars.com Joined 6106 days ago 210 posts - 236 votes Speaks: French*, English*, Armenian*, Romanian*, Latin, German, Italian Studies: Dutch, Swedish, Turkish, Japanese, Russian, Arabic (Written)
| Message 14 of 14 08 May 2008 at 1:25pm | IP Logged |
Armenian lost gender over 2000 years ago, but this hypothesis holds true for nouns (they are almost always the same for the nominative and accusative) but not true for pronouns.
ան = he/she/it (nom.)
զայն = he/she/it (acc.)
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