OT: sorta OT: cases, please help...

<<  i actually read subsequent posts before i got this one (there goes
that dang gettin email out of order thing again...)  but i'm still a
bit confused about the action of 'being'... say 'nicole is a
student'(which, coincidentally, she is...) ...aren't nicole and
student interchangeable (not physically... 'the student is nicole'
would actually probably sound better than 'a student is nicole') but
both terms ('student' and 'nicole') would be referring to the blob of
flesh and bones that is me...aaaaaaaaaaaaugh! i don't even know
anymore... which is probably why this stuff has perpetually confused
me....  >>

But this time, the student is being you. In the previous example, you had
been identified and were being described. Now, the student has been
identified (as in "Who's that student?") and is being described. The
distinction is for emphasis or answering questions.

As aforementioned, the difference can be scrubbed out if desired, or even
the verb, in which case it isn't a verb phrase and you wouldn't use the
nominative / accusative cases and the emphasis would revert to word
order.

Someone mentioned "student" being in the instrumental case. Polish can do
what it wants to do as long as it doesn't do what English does, because
then it would (likely) be worse. (I don't like my native language; it has
something to do with that (C) (C) (C) (V) V (V) (C) (C) (C) syllabic
style and 20+ vowels represented by five or six overlapping symbols,
which caused me to limit my alphabets and syllabic styles considerably.)

You seem to think you're stupid. If you knew the extent of my knowledge,
you'd get an ego boost. That goes for the rest of you, too.

Christopher Wright
The Orange Balloon Man

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