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Accusative marker

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Alijsh
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 Message 1 of 22
10 October 2006 at 2:25pm | IP Logged 
In Persian, instead of declension found in German and Russian, the accusative is indicated by a marker (râ) coming after noun phrase (nominal group) e.g. dar râ beband (close the door)

I wonder if it's found in any other IE language.

***
As for non-IE languages, I suppose Japanese has also accusative marker (o): watashi wa terebi o mimas (I watch TV)

Can you add any information?
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Captain Haddock
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 Message 2 of 22
10 October 2006 at 11:38pm | IP Logged 
I suppose any tail-first agglutinative language would put all case markers after nouns. That would include Japanese, Korean, Turkish, and probably many more languages I don't know much about (Finnish and Hungarian?).

IE languages are not agglutinative, and they're generally head-first, so that feature would make Persian somewhat unusual.

Edited by Captain Haddock on 10 October 2006 at 11:39pm

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Andy E
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 Message 3 of 22
11 October 2006 at 2:30am | IP Logged 
Captain Haddock wrote:
IE languages are not agglutinative, and they're generally head-first, so that feature would make Persian somewhat unusual.


This feature is most likely due to influence from a non-IE language. Bearing in mind the long period of Ottoman rule, does anyone know if there is a similar feature in Turkish?

Andy.

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Captain Haddock
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 Message 4 of 22
11 October 2006 at 3:37am | IP Logged 
Andy E wrote:
This feature is most likely due to influence from a non-IE language. Bearing in mind the long period of Ottoman rule, does anyone know if there is a similar feature in Turkish?


A quick jaunt to Wikipedia confirms that Turkish indicates noun cases by adding a suffix. In the case of the accusative, it's done "by adding -ı, -i, -u or -ü, according to the [sic] vowel harmony".

These endings don't resemble the Persian one, though, and I think grammatical borrowing is pretty rare among languages. It probably evolved naturally somehow.

Edited by Captain Haddock on 11 October 2006 at 3:37am

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Alijsh
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 Message 5 of 22
11 October 2006 at 9:29am | IP Logged 
Dear Captain Haddock,

You're right. It has evolved naturally. Language doesn't borrow such grammatical features from other languages.

***
Since Middle Persian (ca. 2200 years ago) we got rid of (:D) 8-case declension system which resulted in creation of prepositions and markers. In Middle Persian the accusative marker has been rây. Did we have Ottoman Empire 2200 years ago?

Based on Wikipedia, markers are found in analytic languages as well.

is probably the remnant of an ending used in declension of accusative case in earlier forms of Persian language e.g. Old Persian.

I think it's added to the end because Persian is SOV whereas German is SVO.

Germans say: ich liebe den Vater and we say: ich Vater râ liebe.

I'll try to find the answer.

Edited by Alijsh on 11 October 2006 at 9:47am

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Marc Frisch
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 Message 6 of 22
11 October 2006 at 11:52am | IP Logged 
Alijsh wrote:
Language doesn't borrow such grammatical features from other languages.


I disagree. Have you ever heard of the concept "Sprachbund"?
(By the way, the German article is more extensive.)
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Chung
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 Message 7 of 22
11 October 2006 at 1:11pm | IP Logged 
In Hungarian, the accusative is marked by a suffix -t (with euphonic vowel where necessary).

a könyv nagy = the book is big.
látom a könyvet = I see the book.

a vonat nagy = the train is big.
látom a vonatot = I see the train.

a hajó nagy = the ship is big.
látom a hajót = I see the car.

To be picky, Alijsh's example (râ) looks more like a postposition rather than a suffix to me.

As far as I know, postpositions appear in Hungarian (e.g. a nagyapám miatt... = my grandfather because of... ~ "on account of my grandfather...") and Mongolian (e.g. ...xot ruu = ...town toward ~ "...toward the town")

I agree with Marc's nudge towards the concept of a Sprachbund. Compare Romanian, Bulgarian, Albanian and Greek - all of which otherwise belong to separate branches of Indo-European.

EDIT: I just checked out the articles in Wikipedia, and Farsi has a few features that remind me of Uralic and Altaic languages (suffixes, no grammatical gender) and others that remind me of eastern Indo-European languages (prepositions, verbal aspect)

Edited by Chung on 11 October 2006 at 1:42pm

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Alijsh
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 Message 8 of 22
11 October 2006 at 2:51pm | IP Logged 
I suppose Sprachbund is found among languages of the same family. well, the matter is that Turkish is not an IE language as Persian. I should have mentioned this fact.

Anyway, I don't see any need to further discuss on this very case because as I already wrote, râ is Persian and doesn't come from any other language.

In Persian we call it marker and based on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marker_%28linguistics%29 it seems to be the correct name. As being mentioned in the page, ga is subject marker in Japanese.

Postposition has apparenly another role. For example, in Japanese, instead of on the table they say table on (teeburu ni).

***

Dear Chung,

I have a question regarding Hungarian. Do they say two book instead of two books?


Edited by Alijsh on 11 October 2006 at 3:06pm



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