• Owl [he/him]@hexbear.net
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    8 months ago

    Nominative - Brutus got on his horse.

    Genitive - He got on horse Bruti. (“He got on Brutus’s horse” - look I don’t know how to make that look right in English)

    Dative - He gave the horse to Bruto.

    Accusative - The horse bit Brutum.

    Vocative - Brute, get on the horse.

    Ablative - He stole the horse from Bruto.

    Think that sucks? The plurals are Bruti, Brutorum, Brutis, Brutos, Bruti, and Brutis.

      • huf [he/him]@hexbear.net
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        8 months ago

        it’s dumb because it’s done wrong. indoeuropean cases are just stupid as fuck.

        look at how it works in hungarian or finnish, those are sensible systems.

          • GenderIsOpSec [she/her]@hexbear.net
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            8 months ago

            Järjestelmällistyttämättömyydelläänsäkäänköhän

            Translation

            the unsystematic nature of the system

            Järjestelmä is system everything else is added on top of that

          • huf [he/him]@hexbear.net
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            8 months ago

            more like 15-20 i think, but yeah. but they’re far more regular and behave more like prepositions do in english.

            the worst part of IE cases isnt that there’s so many of them (there arent, the most ever is like 8-9 and that’s in ancient languages i think), it’s that each little case marker means a multitude of things at once. see above how it ending in -i means it’s one of multiple possibilities, and each time that lone little -i is marking both case and number together.

            so for the above Dative example, hungarian would have (contrived, yes, i know):

            Odaadta a lovat a Brutusznak - He/She gave the horse to Brutus. Odaadta a lovat a Brutuszoknak - He/She gave the horse to the Brutuses.

            the -nak signifies the dative (more or less). the -(o)k is the plural. so a plural in dative is -oknak. it’s not some third thing, it’s just a concatenation of the individual suffixes marking number, case, etc.

      • PolandIsAStateOfMind@lemmygrad.ml
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        8 months ago

        Polish languange have half of its grammar rules ripped straight from Latin and surprisingly it works better than in Latin. Horror to learn for foreigners though, or so i heard.

        • huf [he/him]@hexbear.net
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          8 months ago

          it’s not ripped from latin, latin and polish share ancestors and the cases were inherited into both from that ancestor.

          • PolandIsAStateOfMind@lemmygrad.ml
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            8 months ago

            Yes both are indoeuropean languages though the distance to that common ground is far, but the grammar was ripped since Latin was mandatory for the educated class in the entire X-XIX centuries, included especially the period when Polish language was first used widely in writing.

            • huf [he/him]@hexbear.net
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              8 months ago

              i have no doubt latin influenced polish, even its grammar, but i very much doubt the cases of latin were transplanted into polish.