fandomsecrets | [ SECRET POST #2237 ]

[ SECRET POST #2237 ]

⌈ Secret Post #2237 ⌋

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Yesterday's language thread proved F!S has lots of linguaphiles. So here's a ridiculous question that has kept me up at night.

Suppose you have a language where a proper noun changes depending on its case. Let's pretend that the nominative for a person's name is 'Catko', but the accusative is 'Citka'.

When you are talking about this person in English, do you feel you ever should or would like to use the accusative version?

"Catko and I are going out."

"I saw Citka today."

In one of the languages I know it is partitive not accusative, but no. I don't feel it. It would be simply weird. Whenever I talk in English about my friends from that country, I use nominative.

Uh.

Oh man, proper nouns are like extremely fixed in English. I don't think we even have an accusative form in English.

In fact the whole idea of an accusative form is making my brain break just a little bit. Okay, maybe a lot. That must get really confusing.

"Yeah man, I saw Tom yesterday."

"Oh yeah? How's Tim doing?"

"... Who?"

"Tom."

"But you said Tim."

MY BRAIN.

IDK, it's usually obvious what the first form is? Because I know at least two languages that contain accusative/partitive playing the role of accusative, and in both of them the changing part of a word is the ending. Perhaps there are languages where roots change; that must be weird, yeah.

But English doesn't change nouns at all. Only some pronouns.

UPD. On the second thought, I can think of some words with changing roots, but the changes are minor. Say, in Russian there's the word "veter" (which means "wind"), but the accusative of "veter" is "vetra" ("e" is taken away because of reasons). Still sounds similar, though.

Edited 2013-02-16 22:46 (UTC)

I mean, I'm very familiar with words changing forms, but still dependent on their roots; Arabic has 10 forms that change a root word slightly, but leave the word looking bewilderingly like it was before.

But changing the proper noun of something midsentence depending on how it's being referred to is hella confusing. I kind of figured Russian or some Eastern European language might do this.

Actually, it would be really fascinating to learn the rules of how the form changes. I love those tricky types of rules.

Now that I think about it, Arabic does have some irregular verbs that have what you call "hollow vowels" that change from it's root form to any of its 10 other forms.

But why is it more confusing than the changes that verbs undergo? Is it just a matter of habit?

For me verbs have always been more confusing than nouns. I learn Spanish, and I just can't with this profusion of verb forms...

English is simpler in this sense, of course. For some reason I find syntax rules easier to memorize than the verb forms+noun forms combination [although English does contain changing verbs, there are essentially only three versions one needs to know, and the majority of them are regular anyway].

Oh, you'd like Estonian! It has fourteen noun forms ^_^ Partitive in particular is used:
after all the numerals except "one"
when a noun is an object of a verb

Then there are those newly-made cases, the so-called "nina taga" set.
The -ni ending means "until [noun]"
-na ending means "as [noun]", "playing the role of [noun]"
-ta means "without [noun]"
-ga means "with [noun]"

Also there are endings that signify movement. Thus, there are different forms for "to move in [noun]" and "to move out of [noun]".

...Hungarian has even more of those, but I'm not familiar with it. Upon brief googling I discovered that they don't call them "cases" anymore, because they make a difference between cases and suffixed postpositions; besides, there seems to be a problem with the way Hungarian grammar works (i.e. it doesn't allow usual Western classification)?

I think it's just a cognitive hangup. I'd get over it quickly if I were to start learning a language with varying accusative forms. It's like learning to read from right to left when I started with Arabic, or learning to attach possessives at the end of nouns rather than at the beginning.

English is a tricky bitch, and I'm pretty sympathetic to anyone trying to remember our very wide history of verb collection. Latin based verbs are usually regular. Old English based words are often irregular.

I actually have been meaning to learn Russian, so I'm really thankful this thread brought it up. Sort of prepares me for some of the more unusual pitfalls my mind will have to get over.

Funny, that bit with Estonian sounds more like how they handle prepositions rather than cases. Hm.

I actually think that the worst part of English is conditionals. All the would/would've been/was stuff. Verbs aren't that hard, especially considering the fact that even the irregular ones have some change patterns (learn-learnt, keep-kept, creep-crept etc.)

!
Good luck) Russian has a lot of exceptions and strange structure, that's why it may be hard. For example, nouns change differently according to which group they are in (there are three groups).
Also the syntax is very flexible, and one sentence can have five or ten legitimate variations.
You can say "Why are you here?" or you can say "You are here why?" or "You why are here?", all of them are correct. It's a bit like Yoda's speech.
Good news, though, is that there are only six noun forms and three tenses.
Stresses are completely random... there's simply no rule for those.

As to Estonian, you hit home here: nina taga cases evolved from the "preposition+noun" constructions. In fact, some of them are still used with prepositions, which is rather silly, because when one says "ilma piimata", it essentially means "without without milk".

Celtic languages mutate quite a lot depending on case. Éire (Ireland), as Éirinn (from Ireland), Poblacht na hÉireann (The Republic of Ireland).

I'd never use anything but the accusative in English though.

That said, it occurs to me that there's a famous legend called "The Children of Lir", but "Lir" is the genetive case. And whatever way it slipped in, when we talk about that legend we use the genetive as the nominative now.

I get so totally confused by languages like Serbian/Croatian/Bosnian which change the letters like that. I wouldn't even dare try it in English because I'd fuck it up.

No, for the same reason that I wouldn't feel compelled to keep gendered pronouns for inanimate objects. When you translate between languages, you need to use the right grammatical constructions in the destination language as much as you need to use the right words.

This. Inanimate objects having genders is a good analogy.

Yeah, this. This makes sense.

I speak Esperanto (which has the feature you mentioned) but I've never had the urge to do what you said when using Esperanto names in English.

However, this might be because:
a) Esperanto is my second language, English is my first, so Esperanto's grammar is easier to toss out of my head when I'm not speaking it
b) Esperanto has some exceptions to the rules of forms changing, and names can be exceptions
and c) I rarely Esperanto names when speaking English anyway.

So I may not be the best person to ask.

No - it's pretty easy to keep the languages separate. In this one way, English is fairly straightforward, and I never get the urge to conjugate anyone's name.

The real tricky part is talking about people with names from different cultures in Russian. Some names are ill-suited towards changing with case, but it feels weird to not even attempt.

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[ SECRET POST #2237 ]

Ridiculous question for linguists/ language-likers

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