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