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What exactly are cases? | ||
Tags: Grammar | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| chucknorrisman Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 5448 days ago 321 posts - 435 votes  Speaks: Korean*, English, Spanish Studies: Russian, Mandarin, Lithuanian, French | Message 1 of 19 04 April 2010 at 8:14pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I've just been confused recently about what constitutes cases and what does not. What are the differences between case endings, particles, and suffixes?
Why is Korean said to not have a case system while Japanese and Turkish, other agglutinating languages, do? Can the "'s" in English be considered a genitive case? Why or why not? Just a few questions that made me a bit confused over the last few days. Thank you! 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| MäcØSŸ Diglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 5809 days ago 259 posts - 392 votes Speaks: Italian*, EnglishC2 Studies: German | Message 2 of 19 04 April 2010 at 8:24pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Actually Korean IS said to have cases. Take a look at wikipedia for example.
On the other hand I’ve never heard of Japanese cases and, if I’m not mistaken, it lacks of any nominal inflection (while conjugating verbs and adjectives). Lastly, the English 's is commonly referred to as “saxon genitive”, and it works the same way as the Nordic -s or the Finnish -n genitives. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Warp3 Senior Member United States forum_posts.asp?TID= Joined 5535 days ago 1419 posts - 1766 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish, Korean, Japanese | Message 3 of 19 04 April 2010 at 9:46pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Particle systems are usually classified differently than cases, but they really are very similar in concept. It was interesting when this fact finally occurred to me with Korean. I was pondering how I've been hesitant to learn a language like German, Russian or Finnish with their notorious case systems, then it hit me that I'm already doing something very similar in Korean with particles anyway.
The only big differences I can think of would be: - Particles (at least in Korean) are often optional if the context is clear (which isn't really true with languages that have case systems). - Particle systems seem to be more regular than case systems, at least in my experience, since they append endings to the base form of the word rather than actually changing any existing letters in the word. (Though there are a few pronouns in Korean, like 나 to 내가, where adding certain particles requires changing the pronoun first, but those are the exceptions, not the rule.) Korean and Japanese both use a very similar agglutinating particle system (not a case system), so I'm not sure why you would have read/heard otherwise. Edited by Warp3 on 04 April 2010 at 9:48pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Danac Diglot Senior Member Denmark Joined 5348 days ago 162 posts - 257 votes Speaks: Danish*, English Studies: German, Serbo-Croatian, French, Russian, Esperanto | Message 4 of 19 04 April 2010 at 10:21pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I just read the Wikipedia article on Japanese language (arguably not the most credible source, but not necessarily wrong either), and in its section on nouns it states:
"The grammatical function of nouns is indicated by postpositions, also called particles." "Grammatical function" seems to imply a case-like situation, and in the examples, terms such as "lative", "dative" etc. are used. Although this is only a layman's opinion, it seems like some people do want to say that there is a "case system" in Japanese, since nouns are marked for grammatical situation, but there might be other people who would rather classify it differently. It's just to say: there might be some different opinions on this subject... 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| goosefrabbas Triglot Pro Member United States Joined 6368 days ago 393 posts - 475 votes Speaks: English*, French, Spanish Studies: German, Italian Personal Language Map | Message 5 of 19 04 April 2010 at 10:54pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Particles are much different than cases. If my memory serves me correctly, Japanese uses the particle "no" to denote the possessor of an object, while languages that use case inflection use the genitive case of the possessor. The genitive case can have many different forms depending on the gender and number of the noun being inflected. Russian, for example, has three genders and two numbers, each of which has a set of different case endings for each particular case. From my very brief study of Japanese years ago, I believe that particles leave their respective nouns the same, while in Russian the noun (including adjectives, etc.) does undergo changes.
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| str0be Senior Member Korea, South Joined 5604 days ago 103 posts - 148 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Dutch, Korean | Message 6 of 19 05 April 2010 at 12:43am | IP Logged | |||||
Could you direct us to a specific page and section? I looked on Wikipedia's Korean Grammar page but couldn't see any reference to 'cases'. Thanks! 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Danac Diglot Senior Member Denmark Joined 5348 days ago 162 posts - 257 votes Speaks: Danish*, English Studies: German, Serbo-Croatian, French, Russian, Esperanto | Message 7 of 19 05 April 2010 at 1:14am | IP Logged | |||||
It's mentioned in the page under "Nouns". :) 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| goosefrabbas Triglot Pro Member United States Joined 6368 days ago 393 posts - 475 votes Speaks: English*, French, Spanish Studies: German, Italian Personal Language Map | Message 8 of 19 05 April 2010 at 3:58am | IP Logged | |||||
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So Korean is therefore agglutinative, not inflectional.
Agglutination is when you add "meaningful" (for lack of a better term at the moment) affixes to a word. Each affix has a specific role in the language and is not phonologically-restricted. Affixes can be and are added to each other, not affecting the previous or next root/affix. Inflection is when you change the word itself. What are "us" and "i" in the example below? They just show that the word is a certain gender, number, and case. Individual inflectional endings encompass more than one piece of grammatical information of the noun. From Latin (and English): cactus -> cacti This is an example of inflection because the change in the word is changing "us" -> "i" which indicates masculine, singular->plural, and nominative. Feminine singular nouns have different inflections to become feminine plural nominative. There are also different inflections depending on case and number within classes of feminine nouns. In an agglutinative language, these changes would be much more regular. From English: English, on the other hand, shows inflection in the formation of singular nouns to plural nouns. back -> backs ("s" is unvoiced [pronounced /s/] because "(c)k" is unvoiced) bag -> bags ("s" is voiced [pronounced /z/] because "g" is voiced) Because I don't much about agglutinative languages, I took this example from Wikipedia's article about Turkish. And I'm only going to use part of it. ev = the house evler = the houses ("-ler" is the morpheme for pluralization) evin = your house ("-in" is the morpheme for "your") evlerin = your houses ("-ler" is added to show plurality, and then "-in" is added to show possession by you) evlerinizden = from your houses ("-izden" is added to "evlerin" and is the morpheme for "from") If I have any mistakes, let me know. Edited by goosefrabbas on 05 April 2010 at 8:05am 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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