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Why do people hate grammatical cases?

de Wilhelm, 7 ianuarie 2012

Contribuții/Mesaje: 115

Limbă: English

robbkvasnak (Arată profil) 16 aprilie 2012, 20:00:43

Foreigners might look at the neuter and feminine forms are being equivalent to the nominative.

Hyperboreus (Arată profil) 16 aprilie 2012, 21:39:15

Forigite

robbkvasnak (Arată profil) 16 aprilie 2012, 21:45:27

Yes, for the linguistically trained - but very few people have your level of sophistication in respect to linguistics. Others would just say: "They look and sound alike."

Kirilo81 (Arată profil) 18 aprilie 2012, 12:15:15

Hyperboreus:So very true. This is really something strange in Esperanto. Until now, Esperanto is the only language I know, which marks cases and uses the zero-marked case inside prepositional phrases. Maybe, this is really a unique aspect of Esperanto. Or there are a thousand languages out there, that do the same thing, but which I simply haven't had the pleasure to know.
Regarding Indo-European languages, the cases which are governed by adpositions originally were motivated sematically, so e.g. a locative case form with adverb ([aside], [at the house]) later became one unit ([near the house]) etc., where the adposition expressed the local relation, while the former locative got bleached (have a look at Latin, e.g.).
When a case has become that bleached, that it could not be used anymore standalone, it is functionally useless. So consequently Esperanto doesn't use cases after prepositions, unless they are useful (for distinguishing place and goal). No need to calque the useless rules of ethnolanguages here.

As far as I know, Albanian has prepositions with nominative, too.

Hyperboreus (Arată profil) 18 aprilie 2012, 15:50:50

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