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On Monday 12 October 2009 22:13:53 Peter Humphrey wrote: |
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> On Monday 12 October 2009 20:37:07 Grant Edwards wrote: |
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> > At least we mostly got rid of the whole gender mess and only |
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> > have to worry about objective/subjective case for a few cases. |
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> |
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> I don't understand either of these two statements. |
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> |
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Latin, as taught, has the concept of gender attached to nouns, as in: |
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girl puella (feminine) |
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boy puer (masculine) |
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war bellum (neuter) |
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Well, that's how it is taught. I seriously doubt the Romans had any such |
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concept. What it is, is nouns that end in soft, hard and neutral sounds. The |
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Romans developed 5 classes of noun, a specific noun fell into one of these |
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classes and the word got modified in consistent ways depending on how it was |
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used. The format was quite rigid. Feminine concepts usually have soft sounds, |
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the first classes of Latin noun was the soft one and hey presto! according |
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middle ages to professors, all nouns in that class are therefore feminine in |
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gender. So you get "mensa" (a table) which is somehow supposed to be a female |
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object. That's nonsense - it ends in a soft sound, end of story. |
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English retains only one remnant of this - plurals. We usually just stick an |
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"s" on the end. Sometimes it's an "i", an "en" and sometimes we just leave it |
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off altogether. All very random and arbitrary whereas Latin had consistency. |
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The subjective|objective case means the form of the word changes depending if |
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it's the subject or object in the sentence. English does this with word |
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position. "The boy kicked the ball." The subject is boy and the only way to |
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tell is the it's before the verb. Which is a stupid idea actually. You should |
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be able to modify "ball" to show that it's indeed the object. Then you could |
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do this: "ball the boy kicked" which emphasises that it's the ball that was |
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kicked. [English has a few cases of this, I learned them 30 years ago and |
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completely forget all examples right now]. |
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The only way to do this last in English is to say "the ball was kicked by the |
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boy" which is a completely different sentence altogether (change of voice). Or |
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you could use this horrible horrible hack: "the boy kicked the ball (and I |
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should point out that it is indeed the ball he kicked and not the dog)" |
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Like I said earlier in this thread, if English were a coding language it would |
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be BrainFuck or intercal |
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-- |
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alan dot mckinnon at gmail dot com |
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