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Cake day: June 26th, 2024

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  • lugal@lemmy.dbzer0.comtoMemes@sopuli.xyzInternational Woof
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    19 hours ago

    it’s less that English simplified them and more that it never developed case marks for them.

    Well, Old English baggs to differ. English lost its case markings on articles early on and kept them on nouns a while longer while German kept them on articles and simplified nouns much more early on.

    In contrast, not only German repurposed the demonstrative “der” (that, which, who) into an article in a cleaner way

    … as did English with “se”/“þē” which started as a demonstrative the same way der/die/das did.

    but it’s also dumping most grammatical case info into the article

    Again, German didn’t dump anything into articles but rather lost it everywhere else.

    There is this idea that this fostered the process of using der/die/das much more often (which made it from a demonstrative to an article) but I disagree because it was a widespread process, not only in German but in huge parts of Europe, including beside Romance languages also English were this reasoning doesn’t work (as shown above).









  • I disagree. When they don’t see your posts, you might as well have gone silent or just post less frequently so they happen to not see them. Besides: once you follow a certain number of people, you don’t track each and everyone of them.

    Seeing a post makes you more likely to want to answer them. If that doesn’t work (as I understand it), you will notice it and maybe be frustrated about it.







  • So you speak a V2 language like me? I’m German btw. Let me give you an outside perspective on auxiliary verbs in continental western Germanic languages:

    The verb comes in second position (hence V2). Using an auxiliary verb moves the content verb to the very end of the sentence. It totally messes with the syntax.

    But that’s besides my point. My point wasn’t that French auxiliary verbs are fancy but that fancy can me many things, in French it’s the spelling and pronunciation. Cases aren’t fancy, at least not the German or Latin ones. The slavic cases are a different story, in my objective opinion.


  • your incorrect assumptions

    Why make it about me? I was more or less playing devil’s advocate, saying if not taken seriously it’s funny.

    I would be more likely to agree with you if you put “OP’s assumption”. Your phrasing makes me want to double down on my original position.

    That’s just a general recommendation for discussions in general, online and offline. I learned a thing or two about my biases and perspectives here. Btw I’m German and that part resonated with me from my little experience with JAVA and my experience in learning about my native language and teaching it to others.


  • To be clear, in general the vocative is a case eg in Czech and other balto slavic languages (except eg standard Russian while colloquial Russian is developing a new unrelated one).

    In Latin tho, it’s more a relict. Other cases have relicts, too, still I wouldn’t say Latin has the locative.

    I would argue that being a relict is a spectrum. Technically, it is a case with many syncretism to nominative, since it is obligatory for those nouns. In the context of LAtiN hAs sOo0 ManY cAsES, it’s not.



  • I don’t disagree but I would still give the benefit of a doubt that “the whole universe” is such an exaggeration that it makes the overstatement obvious. But it would also be read as a praise. Overall, I wouldn’t take it all to seriously. Made me laugh but I also see the eurocentrism and it’s good to be aware of it.