Grammatical Cases: Why are they considered so hard?

[Josquin]

The cases in German are still alive, in that they have direct meaning. It's not a vestigial case system... but it is essentially redundant as the syntax is pretty much unambiguous already (or so others have said).

Without cases, German would be a mess. We have S-V-O in main clauses, S-O-V in subclauses, V-S-O in questions and inversions, which are very frequent ("Heute kaufe ich Brot", literally "Today buy I bread" = "Today, I'll buy some bread"), and you can change the word order in order to emphasize certain parts of speech. So, generally speaking, German word order is pretty flexible. Note the difference between:

Der Hund jagt die Katze. (The dog chases the cat.)
Die Katze jagt den Hund. (The cat chases the dog.)
Die Katze jagt der Hund. (It's the cat that the dog chases. = The dog chases the cat.)
Den Hund jagt die Katze. (It's the dog that the cat chases. = The cat chases the dog.)

Without cases, all of this flexibility in word order probably wouldn't be possible. However, admittedly, Dutch has very similar rules of word order and manages without cases. I don't know how inversions would work in Dutch though.

[reineke]

Many languages have "vestigial" cases, typically in pronouns. English would work fine without he/him, she/her etc -- see it/it and you/you. They're completely redundant -- they serve no practical purpose.

The cases in German are still alive, in that they have direct meaning. It's not a vestigial case system... but it is essentially redundant as the syntax is pretty much unambiguous already (or so others have said).

But it's much clearer with gender. Modern European languages have gender because their ancestors did. There is no real value to gender within the languages themselves -- it's just there and not going away.

What’s in a name? In some languages, grammatical gender

This paper presents an investigation of the relation between words and their gender in two gendered languages: German and Romanian. Gender is an issue that has long preoccupied linguists and baffled language learners. We verify the hypothesis that gender is dictated by the general sound patterns of a language, and that it goes beyond suffixes or word endings. Experimental results on German and Romanian nouns show strong support for this hypothesis, as gender prediction can be done with high accuracy based on the form of the words.

For speakers of a language whose nouns have no gender (such as modern English), making the leap to a language that does (such as German), does not come easy. With no or few rules or heuristics to guide him, the language learner will try to draw on the “obvious” parallel between grammatical and natural gender, and will be immediately baffled to learn that girl – Madchen ¨ – is neuter in
German. Furthermore, one may refer to the same object using words with different gender: car can be called (das) Auto (neuter) or (der) Wagen (masculine).

Imagine that after hard work, the speaker has mastered gender in German, and now wishes to proceed with a Romance language, for example Italian or Spanish. He is now confronted with the task of relearning to assign gender in these new languages, made more complex by the fact that gender does not match across languages: e.g. sun – feminine in German (die Sonne), but masculine in Spanish (el sol), Italian (il sole) and French (le soleil); m

Linguists assume several sources for gender: (i) a first set of nouns which have natural gender and which have associated matching grammatical gender; (ii) nouns that resemble (somehow) the nouns in the first set, and acquire their grammatical gender
through this resemblance. Italian and Romanian, for example, have strong and reliable phonological correlates...

Grammatical gender separates the nouns in a language into disjoint classes. As such, it is a categorization process. The traditional – classical – theory of categorization and concepts viewed categories and concepts as defined in terms of a set of common properties that all its members should share. Recent theories of concepts have changed, and view concepts (and categories) not necessarily as “monolithic” and defined through rules, but rather as clusters of members that may resemble each other along different dimensions (Margolis and Laurence, 1999).

In most linguistic circles, the principle of arbitrariness of the association between form and meaning, formalized by de Saussure (1916) has been largely taken for granted. It seems however, that it is hard to accept such an arbitrary relation, as there have always been contestants of this principle, some more categorical than others (Jakobson, 1937; Jespersen, 1922; Firth, 1951). It is possible that the correlation we perceive between the word form and the meaning is something that has arisen after the word was coined in a language, being the result of what Firth called “phonetic habit” through “an attunement of the nervous system”, and that we have come to prefer, or select, certain word forms as more appropriate to the concept they name – “There is no denying that there are words which we feel instinctively to be adequate to express the ideas they stand for... Sound symbolism, we may say, makes some words more fit to survive” (Jespersen, 1922)....

Conclusion

When a speaker of a genderless language tries to learn a language with grammatical gender, it is very tempting to try to assign grammatical gender based on perceived or guessed natural gender types. This does not work out well, and it only serves to confuse the learner even more, when he finds out that nouns expressing concepts with clear feminine or masculine natural gender will have the opposite or a neutral grammatical gender, or that one concept can be referred to through names that have different grammatical genders. Going with the flow of the language seems to be a better idea, and allow the sound of a word to dictate the gender.

In this paper we have investigated the hypothesis that gender is encoded in the word form, and this encoding is more than just the word endings as it is commonly believed. The results obtained show that gender assignment based on word form analysis can be done with high accuracy – 72.36% for German, and 78.83% for Romanian. Existing gender assignment rules based on word endings have lower accuracy. We have further strengthened the point by conducting experiments on Romanian nouns without tell-tale word endings. The accuracy remains high, with remarkably high performance in terms of F-score for the feminine class (85%). This leads us to believe that gender information is somehow redundantly coded in a word. We plan to look closer at cases where we obtain different predictions based on the word ending and the full form of the word, and use boosting to learn weights for classifiers based on different parts of the word to see whether we can further improve the results..."

http://www.aclweb.org/anthology/D09-1142

Grammatical gender processing in romance languages: Evidence from bare noun production in Italian and Spanish.

"The results of the present study support the notion that grammatical gender is an intrinsic lexical property and not a pure syntactic feature selected only in noun phrase production. We assume that grammatical gender selection is crucial in languages with a complex morphological structure, like Italian and Spanish, in which the ending vowel is itself marked for grammatical gender."

http://psycnet.apa.org/record/2010-08457-002

[s_allard]

The cases in German are still alive, in that they have direct meaning. It's not a vestigial case system... but it is essentially redundant as the syntax is pretty much unambiguous already (or so others have said).

Without cases, German would be a mess. We have S-V-O in main clauses, S-O-V in subclauses, V-S-O in questions and inversions, which are very frequent ("Heute kaufe ich Brot", literally "Today buy I bread" = "Today, I'll buy some bread"), and you can change the word order in order to emphasize certain parts of speech. So, generally speaking, German word order is pretty flexible. Note the difference between:

Der Hund jagt die Katze. (The dog chases the cat.)
Die Katze jagt den Hund. (The cat chases the dog.)
Die Katze jagt der Hund. (It's the cat that the dog chases. = The dog chases the cat.)
Den Hund jagt die Katze. (It's the dog that the cat chases. = The cat chases the dog.)

Without cases, all of this flexibility in word order probably wouldn't be possible. However, admittedly, Dutch has very similar rules of word order and manages without cases. I don't know how inversions would work in Dutch though.

Without cases, would German be a mess? Certain things would certainly be negatively impacted as the examples given here have shown. At the same time one could easily imagine some work-arounds, such as the use of the passive construction. On the other hand, think of the vast simplification of the entire system. Far from being a mess, it would probably be a net gain.

I hesitate to make a comparison with the example of Dutch because I have no knowledge of that language but it would seem that the abolition of cases in Dutch did not lead to a mess.

And while we are at it why not abolish grammatical gender?

[tarvos]

The abolition of cases in Dutch did not lead to a mess because Dutch syntax is quite rigid. Furthermore, cases were abolished when they had long been out of use in the spoken language, and as such did not reflect the Dutch of the era. There are traces of case usage in fixed expressions and the genitive is sometimes used to avoid repetition or for stylistic formal reasons (De Steen der Wijzen rather than De Steen van de Wijze).

German, however, uses sentence constructions that would be completely impossible in Dutch due to the case system: using the dative to express something such as "I'm cold" can't be done in Dutch.

And you try abolishing case in Russian, let's see how far you get with that.

[tastyonions]

And while we are at it why not abolish grammatical gender?

And while we are at it, why not abolish all natural languages and oblige everyone to use Esperanto instead? Languages not designed by commitee are so full of quirks, archaicisms, and difficulties!

[Deinonysus]

And while we are at it why not abolish grammatical gender?

And while we are at it, why not abolish all natural languages and oblige everyone to use Esperanto instead? Languages not designed by commitee are so full of quirks, archaicisms, and difficulties!

Sed Esperanto havas akuzativon!

[Chung]

The cases in German are still alive, in that they have direct meaning. It's not a vestigial case system... but it is essentially redundant as the syntax is pretty much unambiguous already (or so others have said).

Without cases, German would be a mess. We have S-V-O in main clauses, S-O-V in subclauses, V-S-O in questions and inversions, which are very frequent ("Heute kaufe ich Brot", literally "Today buy I bread" = "Today, I'll buy some bread"), and you can change the word order in order to emphasize certain parts of speech. So, generally speaking, German word order is pretty flexible. Note the difference between:

Der Hund jagt die Katze. (The dog chases the cat.)
Die Katze jagt den Hund. (The cat chases the dog.)
Die Katze jagt der Hund. (It's the cat that the dog chases. = The dog chases the cat.)
Den Hund jagt die Katze. (It's the dog that the cat chases. = The cat chases the dog.)

Without cases, all of this flexibility in word order probably wouldn't be possible. However, admittedly, Dutch has very similar rules of word order and manages without cases. I don't know how inversions would work in Dutch though.

Without cases, would German be a mess? Certain things would certainly be negatively impacted as the examples given here have shown. At the same time one could easily imagine some work-arounds, such as the use of the passive construction. On the other hand, think of the vast simplification of the entire system. Far from being a mess, it would probably be a net gain.

I hesitate to make a comparison with the example of Dutch because I have no knowledge of that language but it would seem that the abolition of cases in Dutch did not lead to a mess.

German wouldn't be a mess without its cases, but then again it wouldn't be German as we know it. It'd end up as some analytic Germanic dialect with the attendant sound changes that distinguish standard German from most other Germanic languages. To the layman, it'd be a bit like the Dutch or Swedes trying to use Upper Saxon or even Bavarian (with mixed/comical results). Plattdeutsch still distinguishes regularly between nominative and non-nominative but is otherwise closer to Dutch than standard German is.

And while we are at it why not abolish grammatical gender?

Why bother? If you're going to moan about a Germanic language with grammatical gender, then just stick to Afrikaans or English. Here's an idea: why not move out of the Western European cocoon and learn Indonesian? No grammatical gender (only a bit of natural gender like English), no cases, and conjugation isn't used to mark tense, person or number (pronouns cover the person and number while adverbs and affixes cover tense, aspect and mood; the Romance system of verb conjugation is superfluous and needlessly complicated to Indonesians)

[Josquin]

Without cases, would German be a mess? Certain things would certainly be negatively impacted as the examples given here have shown. At the same time one could easily imagine some work-arounds, such as the use of the passive construction. On the other hand, think of the vast simplification of the entire system. Far from being a mess, it would probably be a net gain.

I hesitate to make a comparison with the example of Dutch because I have no knowledge of that language but it would seem that the abolition of cases in Dutch did not lead to a mess.

And while we are at it why not abolish grammatical gender?

As a native speaker of this archaic language, I don't sympathize with your ideas. It's once again obvious you just don't understand cases, so you want to abolish them. Instead of cherishing the nuanced word order a case system allows for, we replace everything with S-V-O, just as in English, or what?

Also, the cases in Dutch weren't abolished, they fell out of use, so this was a natural development. You can see the same phenomenon in Swedish plural conjugation (jag är - vi äro, jag talar - vi tala), which was "abolished" for the simple reason no one used it any more.

German cases, however, are very much alive! Omitting cases is the same as not conjugating verbs. To a German, that's just ungrammatical and you will have to live with it, whether you like it or not.

[Cavesa]

I am quite surprised with some of the twists in this thread and would just like to add a few cents.

Both keeping the cases (German) and getting rid of them (Dutch) are valid collective choices. And I don't think it is up to foreigners to judge one to be overall better than the other. Each comes with its reasons. There was a movement decades ago, which suggested a huge ortograph change in Czech (getting rid of the i/y distinction) with similar kinds of arguments that I can read on this thread. A newspaper published a well known text with the proposed change and everyone was disgusted. It was generally perceived as really wrong. So, we are keeping a seemingly obsolete feature for now and I doubt it will change during my life time. And truth be told, cases are much more essential to communication in languages like German or Czech than the i/y feature in Czech. So, I would be careful about arrogantly judging the collective of natives for their choices. They know what they're doing. Both the natives moving the language fast forward in slang and those trying to hold it rigidly to the continual tradition. Their struggles and compromises are only natural and necessary.

It is always tempting to judge the languages we are learning, like "why can't they just do it the one and only logical way like us". And this temptation much be even stronger for the English natives, as you are under much more pressure portraying the English language and the anglophone culture as simply superior. But it is not objectively so. English is not the best and most practical language on the planet. No language is. The attitude "look how easily could you improve your language to be more English-like, you stupid and rigid natives" is arrogant and not acceptable, but I'm afraid it is not uncommon. After all, it is not too different from the popular "why can't everyone just speak English" opinion.

There are significant advantages to having the cases. The main are precision, conciseness, and flexibility. Of course you could take away the cases and give all those languages a strict word order that the English has got. But then we couldn't express various nuances by changing that word order. The cases are not a rigid complication, they are a tool.

Also look at the medical terminology, that is a nice example. The Latin and German one is concise and descriptive, while the English one has to work around not having the cases. The English grammar system works fine, when you are speaking in whole sentences. Not so well, when you need to use chunks that are not a sentence. It is winning because of the economy in science. Not because of qualities of the language for such purposes.

Yes, learning the German cases is not easy even for me, a Czech native. But I appreciate German having them. Just as I had to learn to appreciate the articles, which look just as worthless and unnecessary from the point of view of many Czech natives

[reineke]

Languages differ less in what they can express than in what they must

"I was thinking of this today when on the subway, I saw a young man whose shoulder bag bore six red buttons, with "I am loved" written in white, identical except that each was in a different language. They look like this. (I later learned that this is an old campaign that began with the Helzberg Diamond company.)
What struck me was that three of the buttons identified him as female: soy amada (Spanish), io sono amata (Italian) and sou amada (Portuguese). In each, the past participle of "to love" (amar/amare) must agree with the loved thing, and the -a is a feminine ending. The young chap should have had soy amado etc. The poor button-makers had to pick one or the other, and chose feminine.

The German forced no such choice: a man or a woman can say Ich bin geliebt, as the young commuter's pin did. And Russian doesn't require it either, but the translation is menya lyubyat, "they love me". And Russian (more than most languages) forces a bunch of other distinctions on English speakers. The average verb of motion requires you to express whether you're going by vehicle or foot, one-direction or multidirectionally, and in the past tense, makes you include an ending for your own gender. So "I went" would, in one Russian word (khodila, say), express "I [a female] went [by foot] [and I came back]." If you don't want to express all of that, tough luck. You have to. Jakobson himself was Russian. Perhaps his native language led him to the insight above; learning the English verb go might have had the Russian wondering "that's it? By what means? There and back, or what? We would never put up with this in Russian."

When most people tell you some very unusual word "can't be translated", they usually mean words like these "Relationship words that aren't translatable into English": shockingly specific single words in other languages like mamihlapinatapei, which is apparently Yagan for "the wordless yet meaningful look shared by two people who desire to initiate something, but are both reluctant to start." But of course mamihlapinatapei is translatable into English. It's "the wordless yet meaningful look shared by two people who desire to initiate something, but are both reluctant to start." Needing several words for one isn't the same as untranslatability.

What really can't be translated properly is "go" into Russian, or "loved" into Spanish, not because the English words are too specific but because they're too vague. Those languages force you to say much more, meaning the poor Helzberg Diamond people can't make a single button reading "I am loved" in Spanish for both men and women. The traditional idea of "can't be translated" has the facts exactly backwards. Who knew that the truly untranslatable words were those that say the least?"

https://www.economist.com/blogs/johnson ... -languages