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Comments (11)
Have you ever tried explaining prepositions to a native Slavic speaker? It is impossible. We all think that the distinction between "a" and "the" is fairly straightforward, but it is a bitch to verbalize exactly why one is better than the other in many cases.
Posted by sacamano | December 18, 2007 7:03 PM
Posted on December 18, 2007 19:03
Of course, it would probably help if I correctly identified prepositions rather than articles. Yeeesh.
Posted by sacamano | December 18, 2007 7:05 PM
Posted on December 18, 2007 19:05
But you're right: as hard as we find it to master noun-case inflections (ROMANES EUNT DOMUS!), it's got to be a billion times worse to figure out the nuances of to/for/from/of/with if you're not starting out with your feet firmly in Romance or Germanic blocks.
Posted by Colby Cosh | December 18, 2007 7:11 PM
Posted on December 18, 2007 19:11
In the de-prepositionalized-but-otherwise-sage words of Churchill,
"That is the kind errant pedantry which I will not!"
Posted by Geoff | December 20, 2007 9:48 AM
Posted on December 20, 2007 09:48
In the de-prepositionalized-but-otherwise-sage words of Churchill,
"That is the kind errant pedantry which I will not!"
("That is the kind of errant pedantry up with which I will not put!")
Posted by Geoff | December 20, 2007 10:52 AM
Posted on December 20, 2007 10:52
The chinese have this weird thing called measure words. you have to know the noun and the right measure word to go with it. so you can't just say "5 dollars" (wu qian)you actually say "5 lump dollars" (wu kuai qian). Thank God for "ge" it is like a universal measure word. Good for all occassions although probably not sophisticated if you drop it in everywhere.
Posted by matt | December 20, 2007 12:49 PM
Posted on December 20, 2007 12:49
Do Slavic languages not have prepositions? If so, that's something of which I had no idea.
Posted by James Kabala | December 20, 2007 9:29 PM
Posted on December 20, 2007 21:29
Slavic languages have prepositions russian has an entire case devoted to the bloody things, what they lack are articles.
Posted by Steven DallaVicenza | December 21, 2007 6:40 AM
Posted on December 21, 2007 06:40
I think it would be more accurate to say that noun-case inflections do much or most of the work in Russian that prepositions do in English. There's a locative case sometimes called "prepositional" because it does work with spatial prepositions like "in" or "near."
I pretty much freaked out when I read what Matt said about "measure words" and researched it. Check out this mind-boggling list. I also asked a native Cantonese speaker about this phenomenon; she had never noticed it before (a bit like the Molière character who discovers he's been speaking prose all his life). The all-purpose "ge" is "go" in Cantonese.
Posted by Colby Cosh | December 21, 2007 9:19 AM
Posted on December 21, 2007 09:19
Some of you may enjoy this chart of the fourteen noun cases in Estonian. Glad I gave that one a miss when I was picking a language requirement in university.
Posted by Colby Cosh | December 21, 2007 9:23 AM
Posted on December 21, 2007 09:23
Yeah, Estonian and Finnish come from the same language tree, so I'd heard the 14-case story long ago. Still...damn.
And the "prepositional" case in Russian is somewhat of a misnomer. While it does work exclusively with prepositions, with a couple of exceptions, only one of them common ("about"), it's predominantly locative, as Cosh says. However, the vast majority of Russian prepositions actually take the genitive case, with the dative coming in second, if memory serves. (I'm sure at least a couple of people here are already aware of all this, but I don't often have a lick of expertise in what's being discussed here, so I'm vomiting up what I do know now.)
And while most Slavic languages do lack articles, Bulgarian does, in fact, have a concept of definiteness.
Posted by Doogie2K | December 23, 2007 12:26 PM
Posted on December 23, 2007 12:26