Re: Theory about the evolution of languages

On Wed, 18 Aug 2004 06:19:06 -0400, Afian <yann_kiraly@...> wrote:
> English does have a third case, the genitive. It is actualy the
> only 'real' case in the sense that it is inflected. Example: "This is
> Tim's ball." That "'s" on Tim is the genitive ending. It is also present
> in German, where it is formed like this: "Das ist Tims Ball."
Bad example, since in this case they look the same. However, if you
use a noun phrase, you'll see a difference:

This is the King of Spain's castle.
Das ist das Schloss des Königs von Spanien.

In English, the 's goes on the entire phrase "King of Spain"; in
German, only the "König" receives the -s. As I understand it, this is
what shows that German inflects the noun for case, while English uses
a clitic to show a role, but it's not a grammatical case.

> The "s" is
> the genitive ending. The other cases in German, Dative, Nominative and
> Acusative, are formed by declinating the article. This is also done with
> the genitive, but it is the only case where the article is replaced by a
> noun (Tim in this case).
Hm? No, you can have a declined article for genitive, too, for example
after verbs which take the genitive: "Er gedachte des Soldaten."

And if you compare "Der Ball" with "Die Farbe des Balles", don't you
see der->des as well? There is no replacement of the article. And in
the alternative form "Des Balles Farbe", an article is gone, but die
article that is dropped would be nominative, agreeing with "Farbe".

Or did you mean "genitive is the only case which is marked on the noun
as well as on the article"? That's true for most nouns in the
singular, but dative plural regularly takes -(e)n (e.g. "der Bälle"
(gen) vs "den Bällen" (dat)), and dative singular sometimes does so,
too ("Gib es bitte dem Herrn dort drüben") - especially in nominalised
adjectives ("der Abgeordnete, des Abgeordnete*n*, dem Abgeordnete*n*,
den Abgeordnete*n*").

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

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