Would it be even possible to lose cases? (General discussion) Language Learning Forum

Would it be even possible to lose cases?
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Марк
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Message 25 of 35

13 October 2011 at 3:54pm | IP Logged

Iversen wrote:

Danish has all but dropped the dative, and nobody seems to miss it.

Does it have accusative?
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Iversen
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Message 26 of 35

13 October 2011 at 11:29pm | IP Logged

In pronouns, yes:
jeg, mig og min (nominative, accusative/dative and genetive)

In substantives, no:
menneske, menneskes or with the definite article: mennesket, menneskets (norminative/accusative/dative and genitive)

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montmorency
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Message 27 of 35

14 October 2011 at 5:22pm | IP Logged

Marc Frisch wrote:

montmorency wrote:

Presumably this form of the genitive will not be lost:

Karls Haus. Marias Buch.

Or what do you think?

I think that this might someday be replaced by "dem Karl sein Haus" and "der Maria ihr
Buch", literally "the(dat) Mary her book", which is the most common construction where
I'm from and sounds more natural to me than the construction "von+Dative" ("das Buch
von Maria")

That's very interesting. The reason why I thought it wouldn't disappear was that to me
as an English speaker, it's so close to Karl's House, that it's the most natural way of
saying it, but now I realise it's not all that natural, necessarily, to a German
speaker. Similarly, the "fallback position" of "von plus dative" only sounds easy and
natural to me, because it reminds me of the English "the something of somebody" (no
dative of course). But when I think further, we only use this in certain contexts, e.g.
"The house of God", or "The House of Lords". I wouldn't normally ask "have you seen the
book of George", but "...George's book" (but I might say "have you seen that book of
George's [that was here yesterday] [that we were talking about] etc).

I must admit I hadn't come across the construction "dem Karl sein Haus" until I came
across the title of the book that was mentioned earlier. But it does remind me of one
supposed explanation for the English "'s" possessive construction, namely that in old
English, e.g.

"George's book" was supposed to have been "George, his book". And this gradually
"degenerated" into "George's book". But I had a feeling this explanation didn't carry
too much weight, and that the apostrophe-s was simply the remains of the vestigial
genitive "es" that English inherited from its Germanic ancestors. This is the sort of
thing that "experts" on English get a bit up-tight about, but I don't claim to be an
expert, so I will remain relaxed and open to all explanations. :-) However, "dem Karl
sein Haus" has certainly got me thinking that once upon a time, English might well have
done something similar.

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montmorency
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Message 28 of 35

14 October 2011 at 5:32pm | IP Logged

Marc Frisch wrote:

Josquin wrote:

Well, "von + dative" may be a popular
construction in colloquial speech but you wouldn't find it in educated language or even
in texts. You wouldn't usually find "das Haus von Klaus" in the newscasts or in a
newspaper, but always "Klaus' Haus". So, I think it's quite a bit exaggerated to say
that German is losing its genitive case.

I think I probably wouldn't use the genitive at all if it were not the standard in
Hochdeutsch. I'm trying to imagine a conversation with members of my family and I can't
come up with a single genitive construction that I might hear or say in such a context.
Of course, this might be different in other regions of Germany (I'm from
Saarland/Rheinland-Pfalz).

Constructions like "Klaus' Haus" sound somehow strange to me, because you can't hear
the genitive-s.

Well, that reminds me of the English "Charles' house, which is I think strictly
speaking what we should write, but most people would actually say "Charles's house"
(pronounced "Charleses"), and similarly for other names ending in "s". And the more
relaxed writers on English (like David Crystal) would probably be quite happy to see it
written as "Charles's. However, by the sound of it, German does not allow you to say
"Klauses Haus".

Quote:

Josquin wrote:

In colloquial speech, it might even appear more adequate to use the "wrong" genitive
because the correct dative would sound a bit scholarly and hyper-correct, just as in
the case of "wegen dem" und "wegen des" where it's more usual to use "wegen dem"
although it's officially grammatically incorrect.

Exactly! "Wegen des" feels odd in colloquial speech. My guess is that in 10-20 years it
will not only feel scholarly but archaic and gradually fall out of use.

Interesting, guys. Please don't move the goalposts too quickly though, before some of
us have properly mastered the old rules :-) It's bad enough coming to terms with the
disappearing subjunctive and the regularising of strong verbs :)

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Марк
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Message 29 of 35

14 October 2011 at 7:10pm | IP Logged

Can we say that German is changing quickly?
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Josquin
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Message 30 of 35

14 October 2011 at 8:51pm | IP Logged

montmorency wrote:

Don't be afraid. In the written language all of the mentioned features still exist. Just read a good book or a quality newspaper and you'll find lots of genitives, subjunctives and strong verbs. What's happening in the colloquial language is another story...

Марк wrote:

Can we say that German is changing quickly?

The answer would be: Yes, German is defintely changing - but no, not more quickly than any other language. The incorrect use of dative after "wegen" is already subject of debates since the beginning of the 20th century. It's the same with "dem Karl sein Haus" instead of "Karls Haus". This construction exists for decades but only in very colloquial or even dialectal language. So, the changes mentioned here are not a new phenomenon in German.
It rather seems that the intensive contact with English nowadays initiates a series of changes like the loss of genitive constructions or of the present subjunctive - not to mention the masses of loanwords from English - which may appear as some kind of decay of the classical German language of Schiller, Goethe and Thomas Mann.

Edited by Josquin on 14 October 2011 at 8:53pm
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tractor
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Message 31 of 35

16 October 2011 at 1:28pm | IP Logged

"Dem Karl sein Haus" has been around in German for centuries, at least in Low German. This grammatical
construction was one of the things that members of the Hanseatic League brought to Norway, and, as a
consequence, one of several ways "Charlses' house" can be translated to Norwegian: 1) Karls hus; 2) Karl sitt
hus; 3) Huset hans Karl; 4) Huset til Karl.

Edited by tractor on 16 October 2011 at 11:40pm
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Chung
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Message 32 of 35

10 November 2011 at 5:08am | IP Logged

MarcusOdim wrote:

Would it be even possible for a modern language possessing grammatical cases to lose all
of it's cases? ex: Polish

Around 1000 AC or 1500AC would be OK, the school system su****, there were no movies, not
everybody could read, but nowadays I find it impossible, do you have a different
perspective?
Polish becoming absolutely analytical :S

While reading a bit on Uralic linguistics, I came across this article on typology by linguist Esa Itkonen. As much as it's been observed that languages can "lose" cases, keep in mind that the number of cases (and sometimes the typological division between a synthetic and analytic language) fluctuates within the evolution of a language. The common assumption that native speakers move to "simplify" their cases is questionable and should be used with care rather than taken unquestionably as being applicable in all languages.

These comments struck me most as relevant to this thread:

N.B. PU = Proto-Uralic
Cl. Greek = Classical Greek
NOM = nominative
ACC = accusative
GEN = genitive
DAT = dative
INSTR = instrumental
LOC = locative
ABL = ablative
ERG = ergative
PREP = preposition
ART = article

All bolding, capitalization and italicization in the quoted section adheres to the original

Esa Itkonen: Remarks on the Typology of the Uralic Languages (Vienna, Sep. 26, 2008) wrote:

[...]5) How did the PU case system develop? Let us start by considering the number of cases. Here the Proto-Indo-European (=PIE) serves as a useful point of comparison. If we disregard VOC(ative), the original 7 cases are preserved in Sanskrit (= NOM, ACC, GEN, DAT, INSTR, LOC, ABL). Otherwise, Lithuanian and Russian = 6 cases (i.e. no ABL), Latin = 5, Cl. Greek and Gothic = 4, French and English = 0. For those familiar only with IE languages, this creates the impression that a full-fledged case system must decrease in complexity and be supplanted by periphrastic/adpositional constructions. This view is not contradicted by the emergence of new case suffixes or enclitics out of postpositions in Indo-Aryan languages; e.g. Hindi: ERG = -ne, DAT = -ko, INSTR/ABL = -se, perhaps also LOC = -mem (cf. Masica 1991: 230-248). It is also possible to interpret the PREP + ART fusion in the Romance languages as the emergence of a rudimentary sort of prefixal case system.

Uralic languages provide here an important corrective, by showing that the history of language is less deterministic than the development of IE case systems may lead one to believe. In the various languages the number of cases varies from 3 to 20. In general, there is increase (e.g. Finnish, Estonian, Hungarian), but the number of the cases may also remain the same: "The Samoyed languages have preserved the postulated Proto-Uralic case system quite well" (Korhonen 1996: 199). The same is true e.g. of Mansi. And occasionally the number of cases may even decrease (as in a Khanty dialect). Uralic (and Dravidian) languages provide counter-evidence to Dixon's (2002) claims that comitative and/or privative/abessive are adnominal cases only (p. 146) and that the lack of double case (or case agreement) is a rarity characteristic of IE languages only (p. 148).

In the present context it is useful to consider the history of the Dravidian languages, because it is even more indeterministic than the history of Uralic languages. The history of a single language, i.e. Tamil, exhibits extraordinary variation. Proto-Dravidian had at least 4 cases, i.e. NOM, ACC, GEN, DAT (cf. Steever 1998: 20). Ancient Tamil had 7 cases apart from VOC (cf. Lehmann 1994: 38-50): NOM, ACC, GEN, DAT, INSTR, COM, ABL. (INSTR and COM, although expressed by different endings, have also been interpreted as a single case, probably on the model of Sanskrit.) LOC is not yet a case, but a general label for 19 postpositions, each of which also functions as a full lexical noun. Modern Tamil has 8 cases (with a reformed LOC and a totally new ABL). The interesting thing is that in Ancient Tamil the case endings were optional and interchangeable. This state of affairs is asserted by the grammar Tolkaappiyam, written some 2000 years ago, and it is confirmed by the extant texts, where both nouns and non-finite verbs appear in their uninflected stem-forms. It is also emphatically asserted by Lehmann (1994: 42, 52-54). Furthermore, I have personally been given confirmations to the same effect by Lehmann and Asko Parpola, two of the leading scholars of Ancient Tamil. This means that, as analyzed in Itkonen (forthcoming), a language may simultaneously exhibit two conflicting tendencies (perhaps in different registers): towards increasingly agglutinative structure, on the one hand, and towards isolating structure, on the other. However, the conceptual framework mainstream typological linguistics is too narrow to accommodate such a phenomenon. Therefore Itkonen (forthcoming), written almost 10 years ago, still awaits publication. (But in the meantime, see Itkonen 2000.)

[...]

(8) The typological circle and its implications for Comparative Method (=CR) vs. Internal Reconstruction (=IR): PIE and PU represent different stages of the typological circle: either agglutination already combined with flexion or incipient agglutination. (Incidentally, the history of Tamil shows that even long periods of agglutination need not be followed by flexion.) Korhonen (1996: 191-194) also sees glimpses of pre-PU isolating structure.

According to Korhonen (1983), Saami and Komi have reacted to reductive sound change in different ways, either creating flexive structure or maintaining agglutinative structure by means of restructuring...

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