Grammatical Cases: Why are they considered so hard?

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reineke
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Re: Grammatical Cases: Why are they considered so hard?

Postby reineke » Sat Oct 21, 2017 5:28 pm

There are plenty of native speakers of many languages (inflected and non-inflected) who consider their mother tongue super easy or incredibly hard to learn. A quick look at Lang-8 writing samples will reveal cases of native speakers of inflected languages mangling other inflected languages.

As to the importance of the case system for proper communication consider the case of in/at your mom's. The Saxon genitive is the vestige of the old system and a good example of how cases work. In English the case system was replaced by a more strict word order (which to nonnatives may look unnatural) and a heavier use of prepositions. There's no free lunch here for English learners. Similarly, getting the cases right is not pedantry or fine language use.
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Re: Grammatical Cases: Why are they considered so hard?

Postby Kraut » Sat Oct 21, 2017 6:46 pm

Lithuanian has perhaps best preserved the old case system of Proto-Indoeuropean
Here as an example the surname Rimkus.

Nominativ: RIMKUS yra geras vyras = Rimkus is a good man.
Genitiv: Ši knyga yra RIMKAUS = This book is Rimkus'..
Dativ: Perduok šią knygą RIMKUI! = Give Rimkus this book!
Akkusativ: Pasveikink RIMKų su gimtadieniu = Congratulate Rimkus on his birthday.
Instrumental: RIMKUMI galima pasitikėti = We can put our trust in Rimkus.
Lokativ: RIMKUJE slepiasi kažkokia jėga = In Rimkus there is strength..
Vokativ: RIMKAU, eik namo! = Rimkus, go home!

Young men have their own suffixes -ATIS or -AITIS, -UNAS is rare:

N. Rimkūnas, Rimkaitis
G. Rimkūno, Rimkaičio
D. Rimkūnui, Rimkaičiui
A. Rimkūną, Rimkaitį
I. Rimkūnu, Rimkaičiu
L. Rimkūne, Rimkaityje
V. Rimkūnai! Rimkaiti!

Married females: Rimkuvienė, Rimkuvienės, Rimkuvienei, Rimkuvienę, Rimkuviene, Rimkuvienėje, Rimkuviene
Unmarried females: Rimkutė, Rimkutės, Rimkutei, Rimkutę, Rimkute, Rimkutėje, Rimkute

All of these have plural forms.
On top of it, in Prussian Lithuanian there is also a completely preserved dual.

Owning such a name myself I can boast of more than sixty endings, but would not want to memorize them.
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Re: Grammatical Cases: Why are they considered so hard?

Postby IronMike » Sat Oct 21, 2017 7:21 pm

emk wrote:But at least prepositions aren't fusional, the way Indo-European cases tend to be. I have nothing nice to say about fusional languages as a language learner; give me an isolating or agglutinative language any day, so that I can deal with each grammatical issue separately instead of smooshing them into a blob. ;-) I admit that this is an unfair personal prejudice, probably the result of memorizing way too many tables of Latin endings in my youth.


Not sure this is the same thing, but Cornish (and other Celtic languages) have fusional prepositions, like gans, with, plus ev, him, gets you ganso.
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Re: Grammatical Cases: Why are they considered so hard?

Postby tarvos » Sun Oct 22, 2017 11:16 am

Yup, Breton conjugates prepositions too.
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Re: Grammatical Cases: Why are they considered so hard?

Postby davidc » Thu Feb 15, 2018 2:55 pm

You do not perceive cases as difficult because you are a language enthusiast who probably already had experience with at least one foreign language when you approached Polish. It is not people like you who see the cases as horribly difficult.
I have taught Russian to several dozen adults over the years. For the most part they have not been language enthusiasts, simply people who had a need to communicate in Russian. How they view the case system is a good predictor of whether they will succeed or fail. Those most likely to fail see no functional purpose in the cases and suspect that they were introduced into the language by over-educated snobs eager to show off their literacy.

This view is not as foolish as it may seem. They know only English and English has an overly elaborate and arbitrary spelling system. It is so difficult that English spelling is actually a competitive sport. Competition at the highest level requires study of the phonetic systems of several foreign languages. Most native speakers require the help of a computer in order to spell correctly. Meanwhile if this elaborate spelling system serves any purpose, it is one evident only to those at the highest levels of literacy. (Meanwhile Russians whom I have asked find the concept of a national spelling bee puzzling. They would think that in the first round you eliminate those who cannot spell. In the second round you eliminate those who get flustered and make mistakes. Then it stalls.)

Many English speakers learning Russian seem to see the case endings as a question of spelling and thus a test of literacy. This is reflect in questions such as “If we do not put these endings on, will they still understand us?” “Do poor and uneducated Russians use cases?” and “Russian children don’t use case before they learn to read, do they?” For an example see:

Linguistics Stackexchange: Do Unschooled People Use Cases Correctly

So the problem we have had in class is that students view the case system with hostility. To them it seems arbitrary, useless, and burdensome. If we can get by without it in English, they reason, it cannot possibly serve a purpose in Russian. Why don’t the Russians just drop it and ‘simplify’ their language? Then we wouldn’t have to memorize all these stupid rules.

And unfortunately many teachers and textbooks do nothing to dispel this notion. They teach rules about which case to use when but do not talk about why. They do not tell the student that he should use that case because it means something and it means what he is trying to say. It may see obvious to you, but a lot of people really do not get this.

I know one person who had been studying Russian for seven years, but was still struggling. Then in a study group we translated this sentence:

Give Masha the pencil.


Several of the students were able to produce:

Дай Маше карандаш.


Then we asked them to say:

Give the pencil Masha.


“But that is absurd,” they objected. “Translate it anyway,” we demanded. No one could. So we showed them how:

Дай Машу карандашу.


The student who had been struggling looked at this sentence with wide-eyed amazement. The word order was exactly the same, only the cases differed. And that drove home to him that case has meaning, not a slight shade of meaning, but powerful meaning, powerful enough to convey a message which defied expectations and even logic. After that he made rapid progress.

As others who have commented here have pointed out there are a lot of endings and rules to learn and that is hard, but it is ten times as hard if you think, as many students do, that the whole case system is arbitrary and meaningless.
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Re: Grammatical Cases: Why are they considered so hard?

Postby s_allard » Thu Feb 15, 2018 8:07 pm

davidc wrote:...

As others who have commented here have pointed out there are a lot of endings and rules to learn and that is hard, but it is ten times as hard if you think, as many students do, that the whole case system is arbitrary and meaningless.

I'd just like to differ with this last statement. As someone who is working hard at mastering the German case system, I believe the case systems are totally arbitrary but have grammatical meaning that may or may not correspond to the real world.

Before we even look at noun cases, we just have to look at the noun classes that in French are called feminine and masculine and in German feminine, masculine and neuter. These are totally arbitrary categories that in the vast majority of cases have nothing to do with any characteristics of the underlying things. In German it would make more sense to say that there are DER words, DIE words and DAS words. In French we could say LE words and LA words.

In French, and I think this applies to German but I'm not sure, there is a tiny number of nouns where there is a LE version and a LA version of the same word. For example, le moule and la moule. Otherwise, different words are in different LE and LA categories.

What this means is that the LE - LA distinction carries no meaning for the great majority of words. This means that one could simply abolish a class and, let's say, make all the nouns LA. Except for those few words where there is a risk of confusion, for which a solution would have to be found, the whole system would be greatly simplified.

In German, what would happen if all the nouns had just one class like DER? Nothing much would change in terms of meanings of words.

If you look at a case system like that of German - I'm not at all familiar with Russian - we note that after prepositions the noun or adjective is declined according to three cases: accusative, genitive and dative. So, there are prepositions that take the accusative, those that take the dative and those that take the genitive. There is also a small category of two-way prepositions that can take either the accusative or the dative according to the context.

The interesting thing is that the preposition alone has the essential meaning in its primary form. So, normally für means "for" and takes the accusative case and zu "to" takes the dative. But we don't really need the noun or adjectival case forms at all. In that sense the case markers are meaningless or redundant if not confusing. For example *...für der Hund is considered wrong when compared to ..für den Hund . The form den adds no information. It is there only because it is the accusative form of der.

This is something that is totally foreign to a speaker of English, who will have a similar problem when making adjectives agree with nouns in French.

By the way, it's interesting to note that, from what I understand, the genitive case is being replaced by the dative in modern German. How could this happen if there was some really important meaning in the genitive form? It is happening because the entire system is arbitrary and much of it meaningless.

After writing all this, I will add that I do not think the present systems are going to change quickly.

Edit: some punctuation.
Last edited by s_allard on Thu Feb 15, 2018 8:38 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Grammatical Cases: Why are they considered so hard?

Postby reineke » Thu Feb 15, 2018 8:11 pm

Languages less arbitrary than long assumed

"It is a cornerstone of theoretical linguistics: the principle of arbitrariness, according to which the form of a word doesn’t tell you anything about its meaning. Yet evidence is accumulating that natural languages do in fact feature several non-arbitrary ways to link form and meaning, and these are more prevalent than assumed."

https://www.mpg.de/9675941/languages-le ... an-assumed
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Re: Grammatical Cases: Why are they considered so hard?

Postby Josquin » Thu Feb 15, 2018 9:40 pm

s_allard wrote:By the way, it's interesting to note that, from what I understand, the genitive case is being replaced by the dative in modern German.

I don't know how often I have written this now, but the opposite is true. The genitive is replacing the dative after a lot of prepositions because of hypercorrection. Replacing the possessive genitive with a dative construction is considered dialectal, substandard, or flat-out "wrong" in prescriptive grammar.

Furthermore, stating cases don't have any meaning only shows a lack of understanding for the nature of cases. To a native speaker of a case language, certain cases do have a certain meaning. With the same argument, a speaker of Russian could state English articles don't have any meaning. Or, in other words, what's the meaning of the French subjunctive?

All of this is getting us into a philosophical discussion without any substance at all.
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Re: Grammatical Cases: Why are they considered so hard?

Postby Cavesa » Fri Feb 16, 2018 12:57 am

Davidc, your post resonates with me a lot. This hostility is exactly my initial impression of English. An illogical irregular language based on dumb memorisation. But it is an impression I've seen Czech natives get not only from English but also from French, just because of the "modern, communicative" way it is being taught these days.
To them it seems arbitrary, useless, and burdensome. If we can get by without it in English, they reason, it cannot possibly serve a purpose in Russian. Why don’t the Russians just drop it and ‘simplify’ their language? Then we wouldn’t have to memorize all these stupid rules.
....
As others who have commented here have pointed out there are a lot of endings and rules to learn and that is hard, but it is ten times as hard if you think, as many students do, that the whole case system is arbitrary and meaningless.

Yes, coursebooks and teachers should explain more and scare less. That's why I dislike the very modern attitude of making people memorise "useful phrases" first, before explaining easy grammar on simple phrases. Sure, the students "can get by" on a holiday a few units sooner (as long as the natives stick to the phrasebook), but the lack of logical understanding leaves too much space exactly for this.

davidc wrote: How they view the case system is a good predictor of whether they will succeed or fail. Those most likely to fail see no functional purpose in the cases and suspect that they were introduced into the language by over-educated snobs eager to show off their literacy.
Yes, it takes good examples to root out this. Preferably funny ones.

Btw, I don't understand why people assume kids are like foreigners. This might be one of the unfortunate results of the whole "learn like a child" mythology in language learning. Why would anyone assume the Russian children couldn't use the cases correctly? :-D
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Re: Grammatical Cases: Why are they considered so hard?

Postby s_allard » Fri Feb 16, 2018 1:43 am

reineke wrote:Languages less arbitrary than long assumed

"It is a cornerstone of theoretical linguistics: the principle of arbitrariness, according to which the form of a word doesn’t tell you anything about its meaning. Yet evidence is accumulating that natural languages do in fact feature several non-arbitrary ways to link form and meaning, and these are more prevalent than assumed."

https://www.mpg.de/9675941/languages-le ... an-assumed

I couldn't access the article referred to here so I can't reply to this comment. But I will give an example of a major change that is happening before our very eyes in English. Just today I borrowed from the library Benny Lewis's book "Language Hacking German". Right on the page of copyrights there is the following sentence:

The right of Brendan (Benny) Lewis to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

My emphasis. To my knowledge Benny is male but the sentence refers to Benny as her. Is this an egregious mistake that the proofreaders missed? Did Benny change gender? What does Benny think about this? I don't know for sure but what we are seeing everywhere is signs that the use of third person pronouns and related forms is changing. There seems to be a push to use either gender neutral forms or to use hitherto "feminine" forms as generic forms. So we have things like:

A student can have his/her exam reviewed.
A student can have his or her exam reviewed.
A student can have their exam reviewed.
A student can have her exam reviewed.


It would seem that the so-called feminine forms could be applied to males or to people generically. I have to say that I'm not totally up to date on the current state of English usage in the gender politics of today but what is certain is that the relationship between words and reality is shifting.
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