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What exactly are cases? | ||
Tags: Grammar | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| 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 9 of 19 05 April 2010 at 4:03am | IP Logged | ||||||||
Every language has cases. They're just not always immediately distinguishable because not all languages are inflected. Example: The boy gave the dog to the girl. (the boy = nominative, the dog = accusative (objective), the girl = dative(objective)) The girl gave the boy to the dog. (the boy = accusative (objective), the dog = dative (objective), the girl = nominative) You see, both sentences used the exact same words, but the word order determines the words' functions in the sentence. Edited by goosefrabbas on 05 April 2010 at 4:23am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Arekkusu Hexaglot Senior Member Canada bit.ly/qc_10_lec Joined 5381 days ago 3971 posts - 7747 votes Speaks: English, French*, GermanC1, Spanish, Japanese, Esperanto Studies: Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Estonian | Message 10 of 19 05 April 2010 at 6:33am | IP Logged | ||||||||
To say that all languages have cases because you can label a noun phrase as dative in English is the same as saying that Mandarin has verb conjugations because you can identify a 3rd person subject. All language need some way to identify what is the subject of the verb (I won't get into ergative) or what type of relation the object has with the verb, but cases is only one of the ways languages do this. Japanese most definitely does not have cases. It uses postpositions to identify the type of relationship nouns have with the verb, and depending on the word order or the type of verb, adjective, etc. those postpositions are often omitted. 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 11 of 19 05 April 2010 at 6:43am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Ah yes. I don't know why I said cases. I meant what you said - that they have ways of identifying the roles of words. :)
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| tracker465 Senior Member United States Joined 5352 days ago 355 posts - 496 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Spanish, Dutch | Message 12 of 19 05 April 2010 at 7:23am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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To put it in layman's terms, I always thought of cases in the following manner. One conjugates verbs, leaving the verb with "endings" and a "root" or "stem." One declines nouns and adjectives, and the changes in these words are dependent on the part of speech in which the word lies, the part of speech being determined (or represented) by the term "case." To use Latin for example, the way each noun is declined is dependent on which part of speech it is, which determines which case is to be used. In my non-linguistically-educated mind, this is what cases are.
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| MäcØSŸ Diglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 5809 days ago 259 posts - 392 votes Speaks: Italian*, EnglishC2 Studies: German | Message 13 of 19 05 April 2010 at 10:00am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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We have a case system when the grammatical function of a noun is specified by a bound morpheme (i.e. a
morpheme which cannot stand alone in a sentence). (Note that in pronouns this usually manifests itself by a complete change of the word). “The book of Mark” is not a case “Mark’s book” is a case The confusion arises from the differences in the case systems of fusional and agglutinative language. In a fusional language inflectional morphemes conveys more than one meaning at the same time. Fusional languages tend also to have many irregularities and many classes of words, whereas agglutinative languages are very regular and tend to have a multitude of affixes. 
While Latin -ō marks the ablative plural, Finnish has to use both the -i plural marker and the -lta ablative marker to convey the same meaning. Edited by MäcØSŸ on 05 April 2010 at 3:27pm 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 14 of 19 05 April 2010 at 1:21pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
It seems like we've been caught in a web of semantics here... We have been trying to determine, whether or not there are case systems in: Turkish, Korean and Japanese. As far as I could determine(with a quick consultation of the relevant Wikipedia-pages), there are cases in Turkish and Korean, and that shouldn't be a major point of discussion (or maybe it should?), but when it comes to Japanese, the discription there seems a bit sketchy... The situation with certain particles in Japanese seems to have led some persons to describe it as a case system, but with the comments here, it seems more like the situation in other languages without (or with a very limited) case system. I'll agree to the point that the ideas "accusative/direct object" "dative/recipient" and the other ideas which may be expressed by cases in languages with case systems, are also present in languages without case systems even if they aren't marked. It just isn't "case" per se, but rather an "idea of case" which expresses the same thing. With that said, the situation in Japenese must be: Even though there are particles which mark some "case ideas", (or "the relationship of nouns to the verb", like some cases do) they are not necessarily cases. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Miznia Diglot Newbie United States Joined 5351 days ago 37 posts - 42 votes Speaks: English*, French Studies: Cantonese, Korean, Thai, Vietnamese | Message 15 of 19 06 April 2010 at 1:29am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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I'm not sure what is the distinction between Korean and Japanese here?
The only Japanese noun I can think of that can change before a particle is "nani," "what" (changing to "nan" before certain consonants) nani o, nani ga, but nan to, nan de 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 16 of 19 07 April 2010 at 1:36am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Iverson made a thread about our thread. :)
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