Re: Theory about the evolution of languages

On Wed, 18 Aug 2004 13:37:44 +0200, Andreas Johansson <andjo@...> wrote:
> The construction _des Balles Farbe_ was never ever mentioned in my German
> classes, but I see it now and then, mostly, it seems, in more formal registers.
> Are there any rules for when it could or should be used?
I don't know; I'm only a native speaker :)

As you say, it's a formal construction, certainly to my feeling. I
wouldn't say "meines Vaters Hut" in normal speech, either -- it'd be
"der Hut meines Vaters" or, probably more likely, "der Hut von meinem
Vater" with the "synthetic genitive" ("von" + dat.).

> Somewhere I've picked up
> the habit of doing this more or less regularly with _Tod_ "death" - _zum Tode_.
Ah *nods*. For example, "Zum Tode verurteilt" is probably the normal
form, as it's kind of a set phrase. But I'd say "Er hat keine Angst
vor dem Tod" (no -e).

> And then there's the funky neuter _Herz_ that
> gets _-en_ in dat and gen, but not in acc.
-ens in genitive, -en in dative: die Krankheiten des Herzens.

See also
http://www.canoo.net/services/OnlineGrammar/InflectionRules/FRegeln-N/FKlassen/Klasse-ens-en1.html
(or http://xrl.us/crod ) for this class of nouns.

On Wed, 18 Aug 2004 12:56:30 +0100, Chris Bates
<chris.maths_student@...> wrote:
> Sorry, I did forget to count the genitive. So I guess Normal English
> nouns have two cases: Genitive and Non-Genitive.
I don't think that genitive is a case for English nouns.

> Pronouns have three: Subject, Object/Oblique, and Genitive. :)
Nor do I think that possessive pronouns are the genitive case of
personal pronouns; they act like adjectives, not like nouns.

In German, the distinction is clear, e.g. "Sie gedachten seiner"
(seiner = genitive of "er") vs. "Sein Haus" (sein = possessive
pronoun).

> But I'm still not sure that
> you can say that the tense/aspect system of the Romance languages has
> increased in the number of distinctions it makes since latin, since the
> opposite seems the case to me.
It depends on whether you consider synthetic tenses to be separate, I
suppose; just as some number things such as "You will have been
reading" as an instance of the continuous future perfect tense (or
some such) in English, whereas others say that English only has two
tenses: present ("I go") and past ("I went"), all other forms of the
verb being formed from (present or past) participle or infinitive +
auxiliary verbs, and not being counted as separate tenses.

Cheers,
--
Philip Newton <philip.newton@...>