Franconian Beer Message Board
Grammar Tip: The Cases (very OT) |
| Posted by Nick B. on 2010-07-19 00:48:24 |
| One thing that's just occurred to me. A friend of mine once gave a very helpful explanation of what the grammatical cases are and what they're used for, after I'd taken an intensive German course over here. First, the word "case" is fairly meaningless, in that it doesn't mean anything like upper- or lower case. It's just the word that linguists use, and might be substituted with the word "condition". (This I knew already though.) The cases are used to indicate how nouns and objects in a given sentence *relate* to each other. We have only three, AFAIK, in English, but there are four in German: nominative/subjective, accusative/objective, dative, and genitive/possessive. (The dative went missing long ago in English.) In the simple example "I drank a beer", 'I' is the subject and 'beer' is the object. "I bought Fred a beer" shows how the dative is often used: 'Fred' is the dative object which in this case receives the accusative object 'beer' from the subject 'I'. So this dative thing does, almost, exist in English, but it's not distinct from the accusative thing as it is in German. "I bought Fred's beer" shows the possessive case. When slogging through German grammar, English speakers struggle with the cases because you have to learn how to modify not just the noun/object itself depending on its case, but also its associated adjectives and pronouns. In English, however, you generally only have to learn to modify a pronoun, and that based on 3 cases instead of 4, let alone the issue of gender tripling the complexity from there. Anyway, as a beginner, I struggled a lot with why the hell we had all the different cases, and this explanation made it much clearer. Hopefully you understand it already. Have fun! |
| Followups: |
 Grammar Tip: The Cases (very OT) by Barry on 2010-07-19 01:36:48 |
| Grammar Tip: The Cases (very OT) by Nick B. on 2010-07-19 05:35:52 |
| Grammar Tip: The Cases (very OT) by FredW on 2010-07-19 06:33:57 |
| Grammar Tip: The Cases (very OT) by DonS on 2010-07-19 07:57:49 |
| Grammar Tip: The Cases (very OT) by Uncle Jimbo on 2010-07-19 08:16:46 |
| Grammar Tip: The Cases (very OT) by DonS on 2010-07-19 08:27:05 |
| Grammar Tip: The Cases (very OT) by DonS on 2010-07-19 08:30:15 |
| Grammar Tip: The Cases (very OT) by Uncle Jimbo on 2010-07-19 10:48:23 |
| Grammar Tip: The Cases (very OT) by josB on 2010-07-20 13:15:34 |
| Grammar Tip: The Cases (very OT) by TreinJan on 2010-07-20 13:31:13 |
| Grammar Tip: The Cases (very OT) by JosB on 2010-07-20 15:08:22 |
| Odd American English dialects (very OT) by Uncle Jimbo on 2010-07-20 21:49:11 |
| Odd American English dialects (very OT) by FredW on 2010-07-20 23:27:50 |
| Odd Canadian English pronunciations (very OT) by Nick B. on 2010-07-20 23:51:54 |
| Odd Canadian English pronunciations (very OT) by Uncle Jimbo on 2010-07-21 00:31:11 |
| Odd Canadian English pronunciations (very OT) by DonS on 2010-07-21 07:29:51 |
| Odd Canadian English pronunciations (very OT) by Barry on 2010-07-22 02:36:26 |
| Odd Canadian English pronunciations (very OT) by Nick B. on 2010-07-22 07:10:28 |
| Odd Canadian English pronunciations (very OT) by JosB on 2010-07-22 13:28:53 |
| Odd Canadian English pronunciations (very OT) by Uncle Jimbo on 2010-07-22 14:53:47 |
| Odd Canadian English pronunciations (very OT) by Fred Waltman on 2010-07-22 20:20:19 |
| Odd Canadian English pronunciations (very OT) by Nick B. on 2010-07-23 00:05:48 |
| Odd Canadian English pronunciations (very OT) by JosB on 2010-07-23 05:50:07 |
| Odd Canadian English pronunciations (very OT) by Uncle Jimbo on 2010-07-23 06:39:38 |