Sunday, March 04, 2007

Thanks, Aven!

I do think I'm going to either make up (or have made by one of the label companies) labels that say "[MyName] me fecit" and leave a space for me to write in the year or the date and the year. I do agree that the idea of an object claiming its maker is kind of endearing.

I really think I need to track down some good grammar books, and also maybe look into a "serious" dvd or cd based course in German. I'm really, really getting interesting in the language and how it differs from English but because the class is a "conversational" class, I don't want to be all anorakish and always be asking these detailed grammar questions.

Last week the instructor let it slip that German has four noun cases: nominative, genitive, dative, and accusative. She also remarked that dative is really not marked any more in English.

That got me curious enough to look them up. The best I can determine from my reading is:

nominative is if it's the subject
genitive is like when it posesses something (in English, we usually use 's for that)
dative is like the indirect object
accusative is like the direct object.

In English, we don't specifically mark (with different articles) the dative and accusative cases, but apparently in German they do.

Which makes me want to go and track down a book on "proper" English grammar and sentence-diagramming (I know there is one out there - called something like "Sister Bernadette's Barking Dog"). I had a tee-toncy bit of sentence diagramming in 8th grade English but not enough to make me feel like I don't have a hole in my education. (Yes, most of what I know of grammar is absorbed by osmosis - from reading and from speaking with people who use good grammar).

Yeah...I know. People fought against diagramming sentences 20 years ago and now I want to learn it. Whatever. It just is something that interests me now that I'm trying to learn another language - seeing what parts of English grammar have become obfuscated to us as the language changed. (I never understood the subjunctive totally until after I took French, where "le subjonctif" is a for real and true part of the conjugation)

3 comments:

dragon knitter said...

diagramming was one of my favorite things in freshman english. i hated the teacher, but could deal with her in diagramming, because it was objective, and not subjective (she could be such a pain with subjective things).

i may have to learn german just because it's so different from spanish & english!

AvenSarah said...

Of course I'm rather biased because of my field (we take a strictly analytical approach to learning Latin and Greek because they're dead languages, and "conversational" Latin is a bit of an oxymoron) but I think one of the main obstacles to learning a new language for many speakers of English is their lack of knowledge of how their own language works. The fault of "whole language" and the various theories of grammar teaching over the last thirty years, not the fault of the people themselves. But when you don't have the vocabulary to discuss the basic constituents of language, it becomes very difficult to understand a language that's structured differently from English.

And yes, the basic noun categories you give are essentially accurate (though the dative and genitive, in particular, perform several other important functions). In German (as in many other languages) they're marked not only by different forms of the article but by different endings. We've lost all case markers in English, except in pronouns: I (nom.), me (acc. and dat.), my (gen.).
Diagramming is a very good way to work out the basic structure of English, at least on a functional level. And I don't think it's boring, personally... but then, I'm not sure I'm representative!

Lydia said...

I have to say that I absolutely love the case system in Latin; it's so precise and elegant. I've heard people say that English still has vestiges of the case system, but those arguments seem forced.

There are some great German books out there designed for grad students that really frontload the grammar. I don't know that they're good, but the people in my program swore by them, and they seemed solid when I was using them.

(And I was really disappointed when I graduated high school without ever having diagrammed a senstence. It seemed so cool in Little House when Laura did that.)