I'm a native English speaker, so I'm sometimes unaware of English grammar. I had no idea that English has subjunctive. That would have been helpful to know when I was trying to wrap my mind around the Spanish subjunctive. I'm currently learning Hungarian, which uses the accusative case. It took me awhile to wrap my head around, until I realized that "him/her" is the accusative case of "he/she" (used when it's a direc…
> Makes me wonder if there's some sort of grammar that's innate to the human brain. Yes, but what it consists of is a perennial source of controversy. :-) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_universal On the one hand, there are lots of concepts that are found in lots of different languages (so understanding a concept in one language is a big help for another language). Noun case is a great example of that, but i…
Old grammar forms live on in American English
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Re: Old grammar forms live on in American English
#12Re: Old grammar forms live on in American English
#13I'm a native English speaker, so I'm sometimes unaware of English grammar. I had no idea that English has subjunctive. That would have been helpful to know when I was trying to wrap my mind around the Spanish subjunctive. I'm currently learning Hungarian, which uses the accusative case. It took me awhile to wrap my head around, until I realized that "him/her" is the accusative case of "he/she" (used when it's a direc…
The first kind are any word-creation suffixes that change the meaning of the root word, perhaps making it a different part of speech. Such a suffix is called a 'képző'.
The second kind are word-relationship markers that preserve the part of speech but signify a clarifying quality, like belonging to an adjacent noun, or plurality, comparative intensity, or an ordinal pointer -- the sorts of markers you'd use to answer questions like 'whose?', 'which?'. This kind of suffix is called 'jel'.
The third are role-in-sentence markers that signal the function of the word within the sentence. This suffix is called a 'rag'. For verbs, these are endings for grammatical person and mood. For nouns, the most common of these correspond to nominative case, accusative case, and dative case, but then there's one that expresses the notion of being used as an instrument, one that expresses a purpose, two that are used to signify a transformation, and a couple others. And, there are 10 more that show a location relationship; English would prefix such words with one of: at, into, in, out of, towards, by, away from, onto, on, from off of; in Hungarian, the word takes a corresponding suffix instead.
When I was learning English grammar in an American school, a structural examination at a level I was used to from Hungarian was largely absent -- it took until I was learning English as a foreign language, or learning German as a foreign language, that mechanics of English grammar became apparent to me. The dying usage of subjunctive mood and incorrect use of accusative and dative case is a natural simplification, but enabled by the lack of education about the origin of those forms and their meaning.
Re: Old grammar forms live on in American English
#14Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Makes me wonder if there's some sort of grammar that's innate to the human brain. Yes, but what it consists of is a perennial source of controversy. :-) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_universal On the one hand, there are lots of concepts that are found in lots of different languages (so understanding a concept in one language is a big help for another language). Noun case is a great example of that, but i…
Wouldn't idiomatic Latin also drop the subject (marked in the verb ending): "te amo; me amas"? Or am I confusing it with Spanish now?
One thing I don't have a clear sense of is how much including it in Latin draws attention to it. In Spanish it certainly does and so it's used, for example, to suggest contrasts between people (I do this [unlike other people?]). I don't remember whether I've seen or heard it used in Latin with a similar emphatic sense.
Re: Old grammar forms live on in American English
#15http://archive.is/W7XAE
Re: Old grammar forms live on in American English
#16Earlier quoted context omitted.
Wouldn't idiomatic Latin also drop the subject (marked in the verb ending): "te amo; me amas"? Or am I confusing it with Spanish now?
I included a footnote about that in my post. Latin is similar to Spanish here in that the subject pronoun is optional and commonly omitted. One thing I don't have a clear sense of is how much including it in Latin draws attention to it. In Spanish it certainly does and so it's used, for example, to suggest contrasts between people ( I do this [unlike other people?]). I don't remember whether I've seen or heard it use…
Re: Old grammar forms live on in American English
#17Earlier quoted context omitted.
I included a footnote about that in my post. Latin is similar to Spanish here in that the subject pronoun is optional and commonly omitted. One thing I don't have a clear sense of is how much including it in Latin draws attention to it. In Spanish it certainly does and so it's used, for example, to suggest contrasts between people ( I do this [unlike other people?]). I don't remember whether I've seen or heard it use…
nominative case is all over the place in the Aeneid, for example. I'd conjecture that the elision of an explicit noun, given a conjugated verb, is a convenience whose viability is contextual.
Re: Old grammar forms live on in American English
#18Earlier quoted context omitted.
Wouldn't idiomatic Latin also drop the subject (marked in the verb ending): "te amo; me amas"? Or am I confusing it with Spanish now?
I included a footnote about that in my post. Latin is similar to Spanish here in that the subject pronoun is optional and commonly omitted. One thing I don't have a clear sense of is how much including it in Latin draws attention to it. In Spanish it certainly does and so it's used, for example, to suggest contrasts between people ( I do this [unlike other people?]). I don't remember whether I've seen or heard it use…
Re: Old grammar forms live on in American English
#19Earlier quoted context omitted.
nominative case is all over the place in the Aeneid, for example. I'd conjecture that the elision of an explicit noun, given a conjugated verb, is a convenience whose viability is contextual.
It's sometimes hard to gauge idiomaticity from poetry, though, because poets do so many unusual things for the sake of the meter.
Re: Old grammar forms live on in American English
#20I'm a native English speaker, so I'm sometimes unaware of English grammar. I had no idea that English has subjunctive. That would have been helpful to know when I was trying to wrap my mind around the Spanish subjunctive. I'm currently learning Hungarian, which uses the accusative case. It took me awhile to wrap my head around, until I realized that "him/her" is the accusative case of "he/she" (used when it's a direc…
> I'm a native English speaker, so I'm sometimes unaware of English grammar. That's more a result of your education than your native language. (And my education, until one German teacher was frustrated and ran through English grammar, so she could refer to it for teaching German grammar.) English teaching in Britain and the USA has periods of not teaching English grammar. French students in France study French gramma…