Grammatical Cases: Why are they considered so hard?

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

Postby davidc » Fri Feb 16, 2018 5:00 pm

s_allard wrote: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.


If the German case system conveys as little information as you say, then it is presumably in decline. In contrast in most Slavic languages such as Polish (with which this thread started) and Russian (which I used as an example), the case system plays a central role in conveying the semantic relationship between the nouns in a sentence.

These languages generally have six or seven cases in active use. The nouns and adjectives are themselves declined, not just an article as in German. You suggest that the case can most often be inferred from the preposition, but in Slavic languages much of the time no preposition is used, so there is no redundancy. You refer to a "small category of two-way prepositions" in German. In Russian though this category is not small. Half of the commonly-used prepositions are two or even three way. I've even compiled a table showing the meaning conveyed by various combinations of preposition and the case of its object:

Russian Prepositions with Cases

Note the seven prepositions which take two or more cases. They are among the most-used in the language. You say that German has a few prepositions which take either the accusative or the dative "according to the context". This is a very passive way to describe it as if the nouns simply conform to their surroundings. In Slavic languages the cases do not conform to the meaning, they convey much of it.

When writing an essay in English it is perfectly acceptable to finish a rough draft and then go back and correct the spelling. Misspelled words retain their meaning, at least in the mind of the writer. But a student who composes an essay in a language with a fully functioning case system and then goes back to decline the nouns and adjectives 'according to the context' will have trouble. He does not hear the message each case sends and so cannot wield them. And so he must fall back on the rigid word order and the idioms of his native language. The result is at best awkward and at worst unintelligible to the native speaker.
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Re: Grammatical Cases: Why are they considered so hard?

Postby davidc » Fri Feb 16, 2018 5:19 pm

s_allard wrote:The second point I want to make is that I agree that for native speakers case systems has meaning. The meaning is above all grammatical. As I attempted to point out with a few examples things can be wrong grammatically but totally understandable.


I am not sure what grammatical meaning is. The meaning which cases convey is semantic. In case-heavy languages that meaning is keenly felt by native speakers. When a learner mangles cases, a torrent of confusing ideas pours into the mind of the native speakers who are listening. They hear stories about driving cars around inside stores, serving food while standing on dinner plates, and stars going to the sky. Untangling the snarl of unintended meaning takes practice and is very tiring. After a few minutes they stop listening.
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Re: Grammatical Cases: Why are they considered so hard?

Postby Josquin » Fri Feb 16, 2018 6:12 pm

German nouns and adjectives are declined as well. In fact, German adjectives are a nightmare, even for natives... 8-)

German declension (Wikipedia)

The usage of the cases is much as in Russian, by the way.
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Re: Grammatical Cases: Why are they considered so hard?

Postby Chung » Fri Feb 16, 2018 6:15 pm

I think that s_allard should dip into a language that's even heavier with cases after his experiment with German to clear even more of the cobwebs accumulated from years of using analytic languages such as English, French and Spanish. While I can (sort of) see why he thinks that German case endings seem redundant after certain prepositions, it also betrays a bit of a blind spot in that redundancy in grammar can happen all over a language.

I don't mean this in a nasty way, but I somehow sense from his understanding of German declension that he's having a tougher time than he's letting on when grasping the purpose of case endings and how they contribute in making an utterance unambiguous, meaningful, and grammatical.

I wonder what he thinks about adding a plural marker to a nominal that's modified by a quantifier.

In English, French, German and Spanish, it's usual for the nominal to be put in plural when modified by such an adverb (yes, yes, there are nouns that are identical in singular and plural such as "fish" and "fish" ("fishes" isn't used everywhere) or das Unternehmen and die Unternehmen for "business" and "businesses").

"One/An apple, two apples..."
Une pomme, deux pommes...
Ein Apfel, zwei Äpfel...
Una manzana, dos manzanas...


In Hungarian, a noun or adjective that's preceded by a quantifier doesn't take a plural marker. To a Hungarian, it's redundant to mark the plural when that quantifier already signals to everyone that the noun is not in singular.

Egy piros alma "a/one red apple"
Két piros alma "two red apples"
Sok piros alma "many red apples"
Piros almák "red apples"

Only in the last example does marking for plural (suffix -k) become useful (and grammatical) to a Hungarian. Then again it lacks a quantifier. Note also that it's just the noun here that's getting the plural marker (kind of like English - it's "red apples" and NOT *"reds apples").

A variation on this idea of redundancy (or conciseness?) is that body parts that are usually thought of as pairs or a set are marked in singular. It's illogical if not a little strange to a Hungarian to use the plural suffix for something that, in practice, rarely or never occurs in singular.

Barna szeme van "He/she has brown eyes" (literally "there is a brown eye on him/her")
*Barna szemei vannak "He/she has brown eyes" (literally "there are brown eyes on him/her")

This second sentence is very strange if not borderline ungrammatical to a Hungarian because it suggests that this person has 3 or more brown eyes.

If a Hungarian wants to describe someone has having just one functioning eye, then he/she would use félszemű "half-eyed" as in Ő félszemű "He/she is half-eyed" ~ "He/she has (just) one (working) eye". Saying Egy barna szeme van would be interpreted as "he/she has one brown eye [while his/her other eye is a different color]". Saying egyszemű "one-eyed" would be for describing mythical or fictional beings such as the cyclops or Stuart the one-eyed minion from "Despicable Me"
Last edited by Chung on Fri Feb 16, 2018 7:53 pm, edited 2 times in total.
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Re: Grammatical Cases: Why are they considered so hard?

Postby tarvos » Fri Feb 16, 2018 6:55 pm

The reason Dutch dropped its cases is because they had been out of use in the vernacular for ages. In German they are still alive in the vernacular. And there are certain German constructions made possible by the case system that would sould old-fashioned or ungrammatical in Dutch.

A good example is "Mir ist kalt." Literally "to-me is cold." That is impossible in Dutch.
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Re: Grammatical Cases: Why are they considered so hard?

Postby Random Review » Sat Feb 17, 2018 1:44 am

Josquin wrote:
Uneducated Germans sometimes use the dative and a possessive adjective to create a genitive effect: Bist du dem Mann seine Frau? Are you the man's wife?

This is totally correct, but I wouldn't say these constructions are "replacing" the genitive. This is just colloquial language. In standard language, you will have to use the genitive a lot and even in colloquial language you can't totally ignore it.

Systematiker is right when he states that the "dem... sein" construction is correct in several dialects (I disagree about them being different languages though). It's considered substandard however and does sound uneducated to persons who natively speak other dialects of German. You cannot use this construction in writing!


FWIW and while not disagreeing with a single thing you wrote in my quote above, I think it's a really beautiful construction. :lol:

Josquin wrote:You may find it hard to believe, but it actually is the case. The natural instinct is to use dative after a lot of prepositions, however in school we're taught that "wegen" and so on take genitive. The result is that people think dative after more elaborate prepositions (such as "entgegen", "entsprechend", etc.) is always wrong and they use the genitive when dative would be correct. This is a common mistake in writing, but it's already spreading in spoken language as well.

This is a common phenomenon in languages, called "hypercorrection". You can also find it in English when people say: "Greetings from my wife and I". People get corrected when they use "my wife and me" as a subject ("My wife and me are expecting a baby"), so they think it has always got to be "my wife and I" even when "my wife and me" would be correct (as an object or after prepositions). Robbie Williams even sings: "This is the end for you and I", which really makes me cringe... :?


It was actually learning German that stopped me doing this. :lol:
I agree with your analysis; but I would guess (without having heard the song) RW was probably trying to make a rhyme. I think it's OK for artists to use non-standard grammar from the colloquial language for artistic purposes. :lol:

Josquin wrote:
The second point I want to make is that I agree that for native speakers case systems has meaning. The meaning is above all grammatical. As I attempted to point out with a few examples things can be wrong grammatically but totally understandable.

Yeah, you're completely understandable, but you'd sound like Tarzan. Just as Russians omitting English articles, Englishmen ignoring French gender, or Germans replacing the subjonctif by the indicatif.


Totally. These things may or may not be necessary in the Modern language with its stricter word order in order to be understood; but they are necessary in order to allow your interlocutor to effortlessly figure out what you mean. If something exists in a language, however marginal its utility may or may not be, speakers will be using it as cues.

We don't even have to guess what it sounds like, because case exists in English!

He bought I an ice cream.
Terry already told she.
Will you give it to he?
This isn't for we; it's for they.

All as perfectly understandable as "*ich sehe der Mann" and all avery ugly and really annoying precisely because English speakers are cued into this distinction, expect it and therefore use it in their heuristics for parsing sentences. For a language with a simple case system like German or Modern Greek, the only difficulty for English speakers is transferring this case sensitivity from the pronoun system to the noun system. A few weeks constantly asking yourself "What pronoun?" can help here, so can FSI drills.

You know Chinglish is interesting (I know it seems I'm going off topic here, but bear with me): once you get your head round it, it is easy to understand. English really could work like this if everyone agreed. And yet, for your first few months in China, staring at signs purporting to be in English and spending several seconds figuring out the meaning is an enjoyable pastime. In a conversation, you don't really want that delay in comprehension.

Why does it exist (at least until you get used to it)?

It's well known that in languages where the verb changes to indicate the subject the subject, pronouns are usually optional [insert standard examples from Spanish and Italian]. This makes sense, right? It's also well known and logical that languages like English or spoken French, where the verb changes a little, tend to require them. Again this makes perfect sense, they are plugging an information gap as the verb system gets simplified.

What is less obviously logical (and perhaps less well known) is that languages where the verb doesn't change at all usually can also omit subject pronouns from a verb phrase! This made no sense to me at all. Then one day, reading a sign in Chinglish around the time when my comprehension of this medium of communication was starting to become less laboured, I had an epiphany. The sign was this:

May every corner have happiness

I realised that the reason for my very brief misunderstanding was that I was looking for an overt subject that wasn't there and so my Anglophone brain interpreted "every corner" as the subject. Then common sense and my experience with Chinglish got together and pointed out that it was almost certain that the subject was surely intended to be the reader (who we all hope will experience happiness at every corner in life).
Spanish speakers can usually get the necessary information from the verb and so can usually leave subject pronouns out, Chinese speakers sometimes can get all the information from context and so can sometimes leave the subject pronouns out; but English speakers are stuck in limbo: there's just enough information on the verb to tempt you to direct your attention to grammatical form instead of context when figuring out the subject but not enough to make this really efficient. Enter a ridgid "obligatory overt subject" rule to fill the gap.

I think this odd situation is a good analogy for the German case system. There is no case in Chinese and you can't speak comprehensible Russian without some grasp of the case system (from what I hear); but German is in that strange limbo with its cases where English is with its verbs. Your German will be perfectly comprehensible if you ignore cases; but reading it will get old quickly unless what you are saying is interesting enough to make up for it.

Note that none of this applies to making mistakes. Using cases but making the occasional error is almost certainly not annoying to native interlocutors (I await confirmation from natives). I don't find it annoying when Chinese speakers of good English (for example) occasionally mix up he and she; I do find it incredibly annoying when Chinese speakers of bad English don't even try to use the distinction (understanding them is perfectly possible but takes effort). From what I understand, they feel the same way about tones when we speak Chinese: the occasional error is inevitable and often amusing and doesn't normally make you hard to understand; input from an L2 speaker not using tones properly at all is really difficult to understand.

Does any of this make sense? :lol:
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Re: Grammatical Cases: Why are they considered so hard?

Postby Iversen » Sat Feb 17, 2018 12:11 pm

It's amazing what you can live without - like articles in most Slavic languages or tempus in Bahasa Indonesia or an unstressed reflexive pronoun in English, so of course the Germans could learn to live without cases if they had to. But they don't have to, and then we have to abide by their collective decision, staunchly maintained since medieval times - in the exclusive company of the Icelanders.

It should however be mentioned that Bastian Sick once wrote a book (or rather a series of books) with the title "Der Dativ ist dem Genitiv sein Tod", where he comments on a series of linguistic developments in modern German, including a tendency (apparently spreading from Bairisch) to use the dative after certain prepositions (like "wegen") instead of the traditional genitive. But nothing points to an imminent 'case death' in the German speaking world.
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Re: Grammatical Cases: Why are they considered so hard?

Postby reineke » Sat Feb 17, 2018 2:53 pm

Grammatical Gender: Why is it considered so hard?

"Gender interacts in various ways with other grammatical features. For example, it may be limited to the singular number or the third person, and it may be crosscut by case distinctions. These and other interrelations can complicate the task of figuring out a gender system in first or second language acquisition. Yet, children master gender early, making use of a broad variety of cues. By contrast, gender is famously difficult for second-language learners. This is especially true for adults and for learners whose first language does not have a gender system. Nevertheless, tests show that even for this group, native-like competence is possible to attain."

http://linguistics.oxfordre.com/view/10 ... 84655-e-43

Cases | What this word means for language learners

"Cases. If you’re about to learn a language and you’ve been doing a bit of research, you may have stumbled across this term in your reading.

Perhaps it was someone celebrating that their language didn’t have any cases or another complaining that the language they’re studying has too many. Either way, it’s definitely something that gets brought up.

If you’re not past the newbie stage in your language, however, you might not know what these things called cases are.

So what exactly are cases when it comes to language learning?

When I decided to study my first Slavic language, I was completely ignorant of cases and what they would mean for both my grammar and vocabulary studies. If I had known about them, I might have thought about my decision more carefully. But all I cared about was the fact that my grandfather spoke the language, that it sounded pretty, and that it was different than the other languages I had learned.

It would be a grand adventure!

And then I began hearing the word “cases” come up in my lessons and as I started to realize what I had signed up for, I was already knee-deep in learning Croatian, madly in love with the language and it was too late for me to turn back.

So that’s why I want to share what I’ve learnt since then with you. I want to help you make an informed decision when you’re selecting your next language.

Why are cases a big deal?
Different language learners struggle with different aspects of language learning. For some, memorizing vocabulary may be more difficult. For others, absorbing grammar rules may seem impossible.

Languages are also unique in that there are certain aspects of each that are more difficult for learners depending on their background and native language..."

http://eurolinguiste.com/cases-what-thi ... -learners/

"A fully declined Latin adjective would have two numbers, seven cases, and three genders, or forty-two forms, of which you will most likely need to learn thirty..."
Understanding Language: A Guide for Beginning Students of Greek and Latin.
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Re: Grammatical Cases: Why are they considered so hard?

Postby tiia » Sat Feb 17, 2018 4:14 pm

s_allard wrote: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.

These words do exist in German as well. A common example is "der See" (=the lake) and "die See" (=the sea). But there are more.

And then there are - to make the whole thing even better - words with more than one possible article, but no difference in meaning! (Mostly regional differences. One speaker will usually stick to one version.)
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Re: Grammatical Cases: Why are they considered so hard?

Postby Josquin » Sat Feb 17, 2018 4:18 pm

reineke wrote:"A fully declined Latin adjective would have two numbers, seven cases, and three genders, or forty-two forms, of which you will most likely need to learn thirty..."

That's total nonsense. All you need to know is the nominative singular and maybe the genitive singular, if there are stem changes. All other forms are regular and can be derived.

By the way, Latin has five cases, or maybe six if we count the vocative...
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