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[BCMS] instrumental & other cases | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Questions About Your Target Languages |  | |
| Evanitious Triglot Newbie France Joined 4520 days ago 36 posts - 39 votes Speaks: French*, EnglishC1, Italian | Message 1 of 3 12 February 2015 at 1:52pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Hi,
I know how regular cases work in Serbian/Croatian but I found a few sentences that I don't understand : Ja plačem za Narcissom. In my mind, the -om is the instrumental ending. I don't understand why in this case we're not using the accusative : ja plačem za Narcissa ? I'm crying for Narcisse ? If I'd like to say I'm crying for Julija, should it be : "Ja plačem za Juliju ili za Julijom" ? "Nazvao sam je idiotom" same thing here, I don't understand why the ending is -om. Why can't we say : nazvao sam je idiot ? I called her an idiot. Finally, I thought everything with "s" or "sa" was the instrumental, but apparently not because sometimes I find words like : "s puta" instead of "s putom" "s posla" instead of "s poslom". I entered "s posla" in google and it translated it as "from work". So I suppose it's the genitive case ? and "s" means both "with" and "from". But for the other examples, I'm not sure why the ending is -om. Thanks in advance for your help ! 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| tarvos Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member China likeapolyglot.wordpr Joined 4708 days ago 5310 posts - 9399 votes  Speaks: Dutch*, English, Swedish, French, Russian, German, Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Afrikaans Studies: Greek, Modern Hebrew, Spanish, Portuguese, Czech, Korean, Esperanto, Finnish | Message 2 of 3 12 February 2015 at 2:01pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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If BCMS is anything like Russian, then anything that uses the copula verb needs an
instrumental. I am/become is usually rendered with an instrumental in slavic languages. This also works for verbs like to call. S (or c in Russian) can mean "from" and means "starting from a certain point", whereas it means "with" when used with the instrumental. I am not sure this translates correctly to Serbian, but it's what I would expect from Slavic languages. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Chung Diglot Senior Member Joined 7157 days ago 4228 posts - 8259 votes 20 sounds Speaks: English*, French Studies: Polish, Slovak, Uzbek, Turkish, Korean, Finnish | Message 3 of 3 12 February 2015 at 6:42pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
When you want to express "to cry for someone/something" in BCMS/SC (as in being sad because of the problems of someone/something else), the preposition is za. When za governs the instrumental, it's often understood as "behind" (e.g. Sjedim za tobom "I'm sitting behind you") or "after" (e.g. Ponovite za mnom "Repeat after me"). Its use with plakati is idiomatic and may seem weird at first if you're overly used to za's governance of instrumental indicating following something or being behind something. See za on Wiktionary - the use of za + [instrumental] to translate "for" is in the 9th sense of the definition. By the way, this isn't strange if you know Polish when there's Tęsknię za tobą "I long for/miss you" (instrumental tobą and not accusative/genitive ciebie)
tarvos has covered this point with reference to the copula. If however you were to call someone with a proper name, then you'd use the nominative and with the name in quotation marks as in Nazvao sam je 'Julija'. As a point of comparison, Polish nazywać "to call, name" works similarly. I'd say Nazywałem ją Julia "I called her Julia ~ I referred to her as Julia." but Nazywałem ją sąsiadką "I called her '(the) neighbour' - I referred to her as '(the) neighbour'." If the object of naming is a name, then I'd use nominative. If that object is a title or proper noun, then I'd use instrumental.
Your deduction is correct. In BCMS/SC, s does double duty with the case. In Czech and Slovak, it's at the other end of the scale with s and z being distinguishable in each language with s taking only instrumental and z taking only genitive. In other words, Czech and Slovak developed such that the original preposition *sъ(n) became s with instrumental only while z is a continuation of an ancestral *jьz whose reflex in BCMS/SC is iz. S(a) governing genitive or instrumental is very likely just a continuation of how the ancestral *sъ(n) functioned. The preposition's respective Belorussian and Russian reflexes з and c actually do triple duty now by being able to govern genitive or instrumental (as in BCMS/SC, Polish and likely in Proto-Slavonic) but also accusative (unlike the other languages). Edited by Chung on 12 February 2015 at 10:01pm 3 persons have voted this message useful |
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