Grammatical Cases: Why are they considered so hard?

[A Callidryas]

I'm not trying to be the grammar police here, but I love funny juxtapositions and this line in the original post struck me as funny given the context: "for someone who's native language does not have articles"

The line should read: for someone whose native language does not have articles.

"Who's" (who is) is the nominative case of the pronoun, while "whose" is the genitive case.

It's a mistake that native speakers make all the time, but I thought it was funny in a post asking why grammatical cases are considered so hard.

[Xmmm]

I realized how simply ideas are able to be expressed in Polish, because of the cases. You simply don't need as many words.

Yeah, but the average length of a word in English is maybe 7 letters, whereas for Polish it is maybe 25. And 6 of those are the case endings.


English:

The man wrote a letter to his neighbor with a pen

Polish:

Mężczyzna napisał list do sąsiada za pomocą długopisu


Less words, but is it any shorter? Is it any clearer? What did we gain here?

This is google translate because I don't know Polish.

[smallwhite]

However in my experience so far, the only difficult thing about grammatical cases is that it multiplies the number of words that a learner must learn.

In English the word for "Dog" is: "dog" (singular) and "dogs" (plural)
In Polish the word for Dog is: "pies" "psa" "psu" "psem" "psie" (singular) and "psy" "psów" "psom" "psami" "psach" (plural)

Reminds me of this picture:

[Saim]

I realized how simply ideas are able to be expressed in Polish, because of the cases. You simply don't need as many words.

Yeah, but the average length of a word in English is maybe 7 letters, whereas for Polish it is maybe 25. And 6 of those are the case endings.


English:

The man wrote a letter to his neighbor with a pen

Polish:

Mężczyzna napisał list do sąsiada za pomocą długopisu


Less words, but is it any shorter? Is it any clearer? What did we gain here?

This is google translate because I don't know Polish.

Maybe I'm wrong, but I would've just used the instrumental rather than the construction za pomocą + genitive.

Mężczyzna napisał list do sąsiada długopisem.

And in Serbian you would have no prepositions in this sentence (please correct me Reineke if it's not idiomatic):

Muškarac je napisao pismo (svom) susedu/komšiji (hemijskom) olovkom.

[zenmonkey]

However in my experience so far, the only difficult thing about grammatical cases is that it multiplies the number of words that a learner must learn.

In English the word for "Dog" is: "dog" (singular) and "dogs" (plural)
In Polish the word for Dog is: "pies" "psa" "psu" "psem" "psie" (singular) and "psy" "psów" "psom" "psami" "psach" (plural)

Reminds me of this picture:

Where is taupe?

Had a discussion on color naming recently (exciting life, eh?) and we discovered that taupe is often mistaken for a green - there are whole internet memes on this. Who knew?

[Iversen]

My first reaction to the color scheme was that 'flora' should be placed between honeydew and lime - and then it shouldn't be named something as vague as "flora". BEsides magenta and strawberry should be moved upwards. End of comment, let's talk grammar.

My reaction to case endings is that it would be nice if they at least were unique. But in for instance Latin "-a" can be the nominative singular ending of many feminine nouns and a few masculine ones, and it can be the plural nominative and accusative ending of neutra. "-is" is the ending for many adjectives (and substantives formed from adjectives) of nominal group III, but also the ending in the dative and ablative plural of adjectives and substantives from group I og II, but not for those from group III (here "-ibus is used), and to boot the genitive singular ending of group III adjectives and substantives is "-is", but "-i" for masculines from group II - and "-i" is also the nominative plural ending for the same words.

If anybody invented a conlang with those complatications you would think the purpose was to keep people from learning it, but the fact is that millions of humans (including some living today) have learned to speak and write Latin. The system has evolved by itself without asking for permission, but people had to learn it to survive in a society where you needed to know the accusative of "panis" to buy a loaf of bread. And then you just have to deal with the complications.

The confused case endings of Latin should in principle help people to understand the grammatical structure of sentences, i.e. who does what to whom (using which utensils and coming from where), and if the system was simple you could in principle throw all the words into a bag and infer the roles of each word from its ending - but in practice you already need to understand the sentence structure in order to identify the genders, cases and numbers of those words - and word order is a major factor in doing this preliminary analysis. You can easily construct sentences where only one solution is possible (somewhat like a sudoku), but this doesn't prove that confused endings are necessary - on the contrary: the structures would be much easier to grasp if there only was one set of endings, and each case/person/number had its own unique ending. Or you can drop the whole caboodle and just use word order, prepositions and common sense to guide you. That's what some languages have done.

This just leaves the question why Darwinian selection processes haven't killed off the most botched-up systems. And my politically incorrect answer is that those who have mastered the intricacies have grown to love them and don't want to see new generations or foreigners skip the arduous learning process they themselves have been through. So if a language becomes simpler (in the sense that its morphology is reduced or at least regularized) then the sly native speakers will invent new ways to make it just as difficult as before, just by using other mechanisms. Life isn't supposed to be easy.

[Xmmm]

I realized how simply ideas are able to be expressed in Polish, because of the cases. You simply don't need as many words.

Yeah, but the average length of a word in English is maybe 7 letters, whereas for Polish it is maybe 25. And 6 of those are the case endings.


English:

The man wrote a letter to his neighbor with a pen

Polish:

Mężczyzna napisał list do sąsiada za pomocą długopisu


Less words, but is it any shorter? Is it any clearer? What did we gain here?

This is google translate because I don't know Polish.

Maybe I'm wrong, but I would've just used the instrumental rather than the construction za pomocą + genitive.

Mężczyzna napisał list do sąsiada długopisem.

And in Serbian you would have no prepositions in this sentence (please correct me Reineke if it's not idiomatic):

Muškarac je napisao pismo (svom) susedu/komšiji (hemijskom) olovkom.

In your improved version of the Polish sentence I count 39 characters. In the English version I count 39 characters. So yes, Polish has less words. Is this really a win? Did we save any trees or bandwidth?

I will mention in passing that even this test is unfair. Polish apparently can't make the critical distinction between "the" and "a" so English is actually being penalized for being more precise than Polish. "Man wrote letter to his neighbor with pen" is considerable shorter (and less informative), for an apples-to-apples comparison.

[tarvos]

The comparison is between apples and oranges anyway, because often cases are used in place of prepositional noun phrases in other languages.

Пишу карандашом (I write with a pencil). Here an English speaker needs to remember five words, whereas you can just add -om in Russian.

(You can leave out the personal pronoun in Russian, although you could also include it). Nuances of definiteness are often expressed through word order in Russian, so from the context it is clear that it must be a pencil (because what you are specifying is the instrument used to write, not which pencil out of a hundred it is).

Cases allow for a much freer word order, so this eases some other problems whereas in English bad word order sounds much more broken than in Latin or Russian.

When you realize what cases are actually used for, you should also take into account that the whole background is different. The hard bit isn't in the endings themselves. Finnish and Hungarian have tons of cases, but they basically function as if you were putting the preposition at the end of the word and changing a few vowels for pronunciation reasons.

The problem is that your brain has to get used to wiring sentences in a completely different manner, using a completely different internal structure, and that you can't transfer your mental idea of a sentence in an efficient one-on-one manner.

[Saim]

One of the things that I think that's easy about Slavic cases is extralinguistic -- Wiktionary has really good case tables for many Slavic languages so if you search a declined form there most of the time you'll be able to find the nominative entry and at least consult the root and all the other forms.

The hard thing about it is IMO not the sheer number of endings, but the fact that many endings repeat across different paradigms to mean different things (-y in Polish can mean nominative plural non-human masculine, nominative plural feminine, or genitive singular feminine; -ą can mean both accusative and instrumental for adjectives modifying feminine nouns, etc.). It makes it harder to guess what the word's root/gender is and to accurately identify cases at early levels of study. [EDIT: Iversen already mentioned this while using Latin as an example].

As you can also see with my examples each ending represents more than one meaning (case/number/gender), whereas in agglutinative languages this tends not to be the case (gender, case and number markers tend to be separate from each other). Compare Slavic to Hungarian and Turkish:

Polish
od chłopaków
-ów means genitive masculine plural (in another context it could mean accusative masculine personal plural)

Turkish
oğlanlardan
oğlan-lar-dan
-lar is plural and -dan is ablative

Hungarian
a fiuktól
a fiu-k-tól
-k plural and -tól is ablative

(Although Basque for example has a slightly less straightforward agglutinative system which you can see here).

I am glad you are enjoying Polish but applying a 14x multiplier to the vocabulary load

I think that's a bit of an exaggeration honestly. With nouns that follow regular declension patterns (i.e. most of them in Slavic) you can deduce the declensions of other words once you know enough grammar, and even if you get it wrong it's not always going to result in a complete failure of communication.

This just leaves the question why Darwinian selection processes haven't killed off the most botched-up systems. And my politically incorrect answer is that those who have mastered the intricacies have grown to love them and don't want to see new generations or foreigners skip the arduous learning process they themselves have been through.

Not politically incorrect, linguistically incorrect. Your speculation has absolutely no basis in linguistic research.

[emk]

This just leaves the question why Darwinian selection processes haven't killed off the most botched-up systems. And my politically incorrect answer is that those who have mastered the intricacies have grown to love them and don't want to see new generations or foreigners skip the arduous learning process they themselves have been through. So if a language becomes simpler (in the sense that its morphology is reduced or at least regularized) then the sly native speakers will invent new ways to make it just as difficult as before, just by using other mechanisms. Life isn't supposed to be easy.

This reminds me of this observation by Scott Aaronson:

Why do native speakers of the language you’re studying talk too fast for you to understand them? Because otherwise, they could talk faster and still understand each other.

Basically, native speakers have tens of thousands of hours of practice using their language. And most of the time, they'll use it with other native speakers. As long as their grammar and speed make sense to fellow experts, they're happy.

As for why some people hate grammatical case, Mark Twain explains it well (perhaps with some exaggeration):

For instance, my book inquires after a certain bird -- (it is always inquiring after things which are of no sort of consequence to anybody): "Where is the bird?" Now the answer to this question -- according to the book -- is that the bird is waiting in the blacksmith shop on account of the rain. Of course no bird would do that, but then you must stick to the book. Very well, I begin to cipher out the German for that answer. I begin at the wrong end, necessarily, for that is the German idea. I say to myself, "Regen (rain) is masculine -- or maybe it is feminine -- or possibly neuter -- it is too much trouble to look now. Therefore, it is either der (the) Regen, or die (the) Regen, or das (the) Regen, according to which gender it may turn out to be when I look. In the interest of science, I will cipher it out on the hypothesis that it is masculine. Very well -- then the rain is der Regen, if it is simply in the quiescent state of being mentioned, without enlargement or discussion -- Nominative case; but if this rain is lying around, in a kind of a general way on the ground, it is then definitely located, it is doing something -- that is, resting (which is one of the German grammar's ideas of doing something), and this throws the rain into the Dative case, and makes it dem Regen. However, this rain is not resting, but is doing something actively, -- it is falling -- to interfere with the bird, likely -- and this indicates movement, which has the effect of sliding it into the Accusative case and changing dem Regen into den Regen." Having completed the grammatical horoscope of this matter, I answer up confidently and state in German that the bird is staying in the blacksmith shop "wegen (on account of) den Regen." Then the teacher lets me softly down with the remark that whenever the word "wegen" drops into a sentence, it always throws that subject into the Genitive case, regardless of consequences -- and that therefore this bird stayed in the blacksmith shop "wegen des Regens."

N. B. -- I was informed, later, by a higher authority, that there was an "exception" which permits one to say "wegen den Regen" in certain peculiar and complex circumstances, but that this exception is not extended to anything but rain.

Of course, if you get rid of grammatical case endings, you still have prepositions. And prepositions are very nearly as bad—English prepositions are pretty odd, French prepositions require a different way of looking at the world, Spanish is (of course) different from French, and even Middle Egyptian—an otherwise wonderfully regular language with highly logical endings—has plenty of surprising preposition choices.

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.