Grammatical Cases: Why are they considered so hard?

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

Postby s_allard » Fri Feb 16, 2018 2:12 am

Josquin wrote:
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.


Two points quickly here. First, as I stated, from what I understand, there is a change in the status of the genitive case in modern spoken German. Two authors, among many others, have referred to this. Here is one in English:

Germans will often assert that the genitive is disappearing from the language. It is certainly used less than one or two centuries ago, but it still occupies an important position. Primarily, the genitive designates a relationship between two nouns in which one of them belongs to the other. The former can be in any case, but the latter is in the genitive:
...
In colloquial speech Germans often use the preposition von (with the dative, of course) instead of the genitive:

Ist das der Freund von deinem Bruder? Is that your brother's friend?
Wir suchen das Haus von seiner Mutter. We're looking for his mother's house.

This construction with "von" is always used if there is no article to mark the genitive:

Er ist ein Freund von mir. He's a friend of mine.
Das Abstellen von Farhrädern ist verboten. The parking of bicycles is forbidden.

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?
...
Prepositions that take the genitive:

A number of prepositions take a genitive object. The most common are statt and anstatt [instead of], trotz [in spite of], wegen [because of] and während [during]. In normal speech, German often use the dative after trotz and wegen. The grammar-police find that appalling, but in fact the dative is actually the older form.

http://www.dartmouth.edu/~deutsch/Grammatik/Nouns/genitive.html
The above website has a reference to the book with a tongue-in-cheek title by Bastian Stick:

Der Dativ ist dem Genitiv sein Tod - Folge 1-3: Ein Wegweiser durch den Irrgarten der deutschen Sprache.

This can be easily purchased on Amazon.
Here is a German quote:

Zugegeben, es geht dem deutschen Genitiv nicht gut. Sein Niedergang, seit Jahren beklagt, zeigt sich an vielen Beispielen. Verben, die einen Genitiv nach sich ziehen, wie „bezichtigen“, „harren“ oder „gedenken“, klingen veraltet oder sind zu Phrasen erstarrt. Wer wird heute noch ernsthaft sagen: „Ich harre dein“? Präpositionen wie „wegen“ werden mittlerweile auch mit dem Dativ benutzt. Und das Genitiv-s wird nicht selten mit einem Apostroph abgetrennt, etwa auf dem Werbeschild von „Gabi’s Nagelstudio“. Wer den Fehler überhaupt noch bemerkt, dem graust es bildungsbürgerlich. Doch woher rührt der Deutschen weit verbreitete Genitivaversion?
http://www.tagesspiegel.de/wissen/zur-zukunft-des-genitivs-die-augen-meines-hund/9946496.html

I find it hard to believe that the genitive is replacing the dative but I might be wrong. I'm new to German.

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.

An to come back to the OP's question: Why are grammatical cases hard? They are hard because they are arbitrary and have only grammatical meaning that native speakers acquire through considerable exposure.
Edit: put in url's
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Re: Grammatical Cases: Why are they considered so hard?

Postby reineke » Fri Feb 16, 2018 5:16 am

s_allard wrote:
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.


Three takeaways about the research:

"Language is less arbitrary than assumed: the sounds and shapes of words can reveal aspects of meaning and grammatical function
The paper captures an emerging consensus in the field that arbitrariness is necessary, but not sufficient to account for vocabulary structure."

Signifier/signified
(For the benefit of the group)

The concept of signs has been around for a long time, having been studied by many philosophers who include Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, and others from the medieval period such as William of Ockham. The term "semiotics" "comes from the Greek root, seme, as in semeiotikos, an interpreter of signs".[5] It wasn't until the 20th century, however, that Saussure and American philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce brought the term into awareness. While both Saussure and Peirce contributed greatly to the concept of signs, it is important to note that each differed in their approach to the study, and it was Saussure who created the terms signifier and signified in order to break down what a sign was.

Succeeding these founders were numerous philosophers and linguists who defined themselves as semioticians. These semioticians have each brought their own concerns to the study of signs. Umberto Eco (1976), a distinguished Italian semiotician, came to the conclusion that "if signs can be used to tell the truth, they can also be used to lie".[6] Postmodernist social theorist Jean Baudrillard spoke of hyperreality, which referred to a copy becoming more real than reality. In other words, how the signifier becomes more important than the signified. Then French semiotician Roland Barthes used signs to explain the concept of connotation – cultural meanings attached to words – and denotation – literal or explicit meanings of words.[7] Without Saussure's breakdown of signs into signified and signifier, however, these semioticians would not have had anything to base their concepts on."

Wikip.(I both love it and hate it)

"No sign makes sense on its own but only in relation to other signs. Both signifier and signified are purely relational entities, correlated by the language system."

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

Postby s_allard » Fri Feb 16, 2018 6:40 am

zenmonkey wrote:German is my fourth solid language - my first were Spanish / English / French.

So learning this:
German

Masc. Fem. Neut. Plural
Nom. der die das die
Acc. den die das die
Dat. dem der dem den
Gen. des der des der

versus English

Masc. Fem. Neut. Plural
Nom. The The The The
Acc. The The The The
Dat. The The The The
Gen. The The The The

was a pain in the butt. "Is the 'der' masculine? Yes, but no...." It's a task, doable but memorisation intensive.

But the thing that made me cry like a little boy that just dropped the most delicious vanilla mango ice cream on the pavement were the dual prepositions "an, auf, hinter, in, neben, über, unter, vor and zwischen" and having to learn them and then think about the subject moving or not moving and all that jazz.

And 'trotz' can kiss my genitive butt.


This post pretty much explains why a case system like that of German is so difficult. Iversen and another poster have alluded to the confusing implementations of case distinctions. As zenmonkey so rightly points out, the system of German articles is very confusing because the exact same forms are used with different meanings. In the table given there are only five different forms for 12 different slots. If we had 12 different forms, the whole thing would be much easier to learn because we could associate a form with a meaning. As it stands, forms der and die appear four different times each.

This is exactly why I say the system is so arbitrary and has no basis in meaning. How can der represent the masculine singular accusative, feminine dative, the feminine genitive and the genitive plural all at the same time?
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Re: Grammatical Cases: Why are they considered so hard?

Postby tarvos » Fri Feb 16, 2018 8:33 am

The case of German is a bit special, because its word order is far too rigid for it to really need cases. Dutch, its little sister language, abolished all cases in 1946 because people stopped using them. Our syntax is almost 99% that of German.
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Re: Grammatical Cases: Why are they considered so hard?

Postby s_allard » Fri Feb 16, 2018 12:23 pm

tarvos wrote:The case of German is a bit special, because its word order is far too rigid for it to really need cases. Dutch, its little sister language, abolished all cases in 1946 because people stopped using them. Our syntax is almost 99% that of German.


Kudos to tarvos for bringing up the example of the decline of the case system in Dutch. All this is explained in a great Wikipedia article:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archaic_Dutch_declension

Now, the interesting question is why did this change take place in Dutch and not in German, but that will be a debate for another day.
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Re: Grammatical Cases: Why are they considered so hard?

Postby Random Review » Fri Feb 16, 2018 12:49 pm

s_allard wrote:
zenmonkey wrote:German is my fourth solid language - my first were Spanish / English / French.

So learning this:
German

Masc. Fem. Neut. Plural
Nom. der die das die
Acc. den die das die
Dat. dem der dem den
Gen. des der des der

versus English

Masc. Fem. Neut. Plural
Nom. The The The The
Acc. The The The The
Dat. The The The The
Gen. The The The The

was a pain in the butt. "Is the 'der' masculine? Yes, but no...." It's a task, doable but memorisation intensive.

But the thing that made me cry like a little boy that just dropped the most delicious vanilla mango ice cream on the pavement were the dual prepositions "an, auf, hinter, in, neben, über, unter, vor and zwischen" and having to learn them and then think about the subject moving or not moving and all that jazz.

And 'trotz' can kiss my genitive butt.


This post pretty much explains why a case system like that of German is so difficult. Iversen and another poster have alluded to the confusing implementations of case distinctions. As zenmonkey so rightly points out, the system of German articles is very confusing because the exact same forms are used with different meanings. In the table given there are only five different forms for 12 different slots. If we had 12 different forms, the whole thing would be much easier to learn because we could associate a form with a meaning. As it stands, forms der and die appear four different times each.

This is exactly why I say the system is so arbitrary and has no basis in meaning. How can der represent the masculine singular accusative, feminine dative, the feminine genitive and the genitive plural all at the same time?


It's not, though. If you write them in a table like that, it looks arbitrary; but what about a table like this (I'm assuming the learner has mastered the pronoun system)?

***********M******N**********F********Pl
Nom*****er/der*****es/das*****sie/die*****sie/die
Acc*****ihn/den*****es/das***** sie/die*****sie/die
Dat*****ihm/dem*****ihm/dem*****ihr/der*****ihnen/den

We can even cheat a little* and get the genitive if we use the English possessive determiners instead of the German possessive pronouns.

his/des its/des her/der their/der

I say cheat a little because the correspondence between the German genitive case endings and English possessive determiners surely must have a common origin in the Proto-Germanic case ending system (can anyone confirm this?).

It's so beautiful and, best of all, this kind of thing still has fossils in English:

who-he whom-him whose-his what-it/that
Last edited by Random Review on Fri Feb 16, 2018 2:17 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Grammatical Cases: Why are they considered so hard?

Postby MrPenguin » Fri Feb 16, 2018 1:45 pm

To illustrate why it be ridiculous to deliberate neglect case when learn foreign language, on ground that they be arbitrary, and unnecessary to communicate, I have decide to write this post without feature of English that be arbitrary and unnecessary to communicate. Very enjoyable to read, yes? You will sure respect and welcome learner of English who speak or write like this on purpose, because they think there be no point in even try.
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Re: Grammatical Cases: Why are they considered so hard?

Postby s_allard » Fri Feb 16, 2018 2:28 pm

We can look at this question of why grammatical cases are hard for certain language learners in the context of the larger question: What are the causes ofmajor mistakes or difficulties in learning a specific language. For example, what problems do speakers of English have in French or in German? I'll come back to German in a second, but in French the number one problem that dogs all learners to the end is the grammatical gender system. I'll skip most of the details but the fundamental cause of the problem is the absence in English of a similar system. The difficulty isn't having to remember that nouns fall into either the LE or LA category, it's the fact that you have to make a whole bunch of things agree with the grammatical gender of the key noun.

For German, I'm certain that for English speakers the noun case system must be high on the list. Speaking of lists, there is an Easy German video on the 10 Common Mistakes German Learners Make. I don't think it's aimed specifically at English-speakers learning German but it is very instructive. What we see in most of the examples is that German makes a distinction of form and meaning that English makes differently. So, for example, mistake number 1 is the distinction in German between kennen and wissen. In English, both are "to know".

It's fundamentally the same thing with the German noun case system. This is a complex system used to render meanings. English can render the same meanings but not in the same way German does. This why it is difficult for English speakers.

Whether we like it or not, that's how the system works. We know why it's difficult. In my opinion the real debate should be what is the best way to learn the system.
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Re: Grammatical Cases: Why are they considered so hard?

Postby Systematiker » Fri Feb 16, 2018 4:36 pm

s_allard 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?


Yeah, or, you know, as Josquin mentioned, it's a perfectly acceptable construction is certain "dialects" (these are languages, BTW) that get lumped as "uneducated" because they're not the standardized version...

Seriously, this makes me want to scream.

s_allard wrote:It's fundamentally the same thing with the German noun case system. This is a complex system used to render meanings. English can render the same meanings but not in the same way German does. This why it is difficult for English speakers.

Whether we like it or not, that's how the system works. We know why it's difficult. In my opinion the real debate should be what is the best way to learn the system.


This, however, I agree with.
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Re: Grammatical Cases: Why are they considered so hard?

Postby Josquin » Fri Feb 16, 2018 4:55 pm

s_allard wrote:Two points quickly here. First, as I stated, from what I understand, there is a change in the status of the genitive case in modern spoken German. Two authors, among many others, have referred to this. Here is one in English:

Germans will often assert that the genitive is disappearing from the language. It is certainly used less than one or two centuries ago, but it still occupies an important position. Primarily, the genitive designates a relationship between two nouns in which one of them belongs to the other. The former can be in any case, but the latter is in the genitive:
...
In colloquial speech Germans often use the preposition von (with the dative, of course) instead of the genitive:

Ist das der Freund von deinem Bruder? Is that your brother's friend?
Wir suchen das Haus von seiner Mutter. We're looking for his mother's house.

This construction with "von" is always used if there is no article to mark the genitive:

Er ist ein Freund von mir. He's a friend of mine.
Das Abstellen von Fahrrädern ist verboten. The parking of bicycles is forbidden.

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!

Prepositions that take the genitive:

A number of prepositions take a genitive object. The most common are statt and anstatt [instead of], trotz [in spite of], wegen [because of] and während [during]. In normal speech, German often use the dative after trotz and wegen. The grammar-police find that appalling, but in fact the dative is actually the older form.
[/i]
http://www.dartmouth.edu/~deutsch/Grammatik/Nouns/genitive.html
The above website has a reference to the book with a tongue-in-cheek title by Bastian Stick:

Der Dativ ist dem Genitiv sein Tod - Folge 1-3: Ein Wegweiser durch den Irrgarten der deutschen Sprache.

This can be easily purchased on Amazon.
Here is a German quote:

Zugegeben, es geht dem deutschen Genitiv nicht gut. Sein Niedergang, seit Jahren beklagt, zeigt sich an vielen Beispielen. Verben, die einen Genitiv nach sich ziehen, wie „bezichtigen“, „harren“ oder „gedenken“, klingen veraltet oder sind zu Phrasen erstarrt. Wer wird heute noch ernsthaft sagen: „Ich harre dein“? Präpositionen wie „wegen“ werden mittlerweile auch mit dem Dativ benutzt. Und das Genitiv-s wird nicht selten mit einem Apostroph abgetrennt, etwa auf dem Werbeschild von „Gabi’s Nagelstudio“. Wer den Fehler überhaupt noch bemerkt, dem graust es bildungsbürgerlich. Doch woher rührt der Deutschen weit verbreitete Genitivaversion?
http://www.tagesspiegel.de/wissen/zur-zukunft-des-genitivs-die-augen-meines-hund/9946496.html

I find it hard to believe that the genitive is replacing the dative but I might be wrong. I'm new to German.

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... :?

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.
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