Re: OT: sorta OT: cases: please help...

nicole dobrowolski <fuzzybluemonkeys@...>:

[...]
> <more snippage>
> > Instrumental: Used when talking about when something was
> > accomplished with
> > something. I dug a hole with a shovel. - with a shovel would be
> > instrumental.
> >
> here are some of the examples my polish professor gave us:
> 'i write with a pen'... ok that works 'pen' is in the instrumental
> case, but the next example is: 'i am a student'... huh? what?
> wouldn't both 'i' and 'student' be nominative?
Not in Polish.

Well, there are two things: a NAME and FUNCTIONS. Latin case called genitive
had for example also the partitive function. And in Mongolian AFAIR there's
one case for dative (where to?) and locative (where?) function. And in such
a weird language as Polish you use for example genitive to denote objects in
negative sentences:

    Ania bije Kasie~.
    Anne(nom.) beat Kate(acc.).

but:

    Ania nie bije Kasi.
    Anne(nom.) don't beat Kate(gen.).

You also use so called instrumental:

    Pisze~ ol~ówkiem.
    I write with a pencil(instr.)

also with copula:

    Jestem ol~ówkiem.
    I am a pencil.

I don't know why is that so but it has one advantage - free word order

And the use with prepositions has often nothing to do with the name of a
case. Anyway in IE langs with traditional case system like Latin or Greek
but also Slavonic.

--
Lukasz K.



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