I studied French, Spanish and Japanese and none of these languages had cases like in the Russian language. Is Russian unique or are there other languages out there that use cases?
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I studied French, Spanish and Japanese and none of these languages had cases like in the Russian language. Is Russian unique or are there other languages out there that use cases?
I'd wager all or most slavic languages use cases. I know Bulgarian does, and I'm almost positive German (although it's not a slavic language) uses cases also....
-Fantom
Cases are certainly not unique to Russian. Greek and German have cases, and Latin had 6 cases.
right, I learned Latin in University, they got 6 cases, German got 4, I learned that language as well. Not that I speak any of them. :)Quote:
Originally Posted by Cyphyr
Well, English does have 4 cases for pronouns and 2 for nouns. I read that old English had 4 cases for nouns.
Most languages with the exception of Chinese and Japanese have some form of cases.
I think Finnish and Hungarian have a really large number of cases. Can't remember exactly how many, but when I read about it, I felt a whole lot better about learning Russian :)
Finnish has 13-15 cases depending on your dialect.
Боже! Luckily I didn't meet a hot Finnish woman!!!!! :PQuote:
Originally Posted by Darobat
-Fantom
Turk languages, like Turkish, Uzbek, Tartat etc do not have cases.Quote:
Originally Posted by Darobat
Well, saying that Japanese or Turkish languages don't have cases may or may not be correct, depending on how you define case. According to Merriam-Webster Unabridged Dictionary, case is:
3 a an inflectional form indicating the sense relation (as that of subject, object, possessor, thing possessed) to another word in the context.
So, do Japanese words have inflectional forms? It depends on wether you regard suffixes -ni, -no, -ga etc as suffixes (which is the traditional approach of Russian and Soviet linguistics) or as particles. For me, Japanese most certainly has cases.
As far as Turkish languages are concerned, I don't know what Uzbek or Tatar grammarians have to say on the subject. Hoever, all Kazakh grammars that I have seen, use term "септiк" -- e.g. жатыс септiк, барыс септiк, табыс септiк (местный, направительный, винительный падежи) etc.
Example:
Мектеп -- a school
Мектепте -- in a school
Мектепке -- to a school
I think that all Slavic languages exept Macedonian have cases. Serbian and Croatian have 7 cases.
Dutch, has cases,... but they are not realy used anymore. Only in some expresions.
Kazakh language is turkish as well, so, probably you are right. I do not speak neither Uzbek nor Tartar.Quote:
Originally Posted by translations.nm.ru
polish has 7 cases. actually id dare to say most of the slavic languages have cases.
German is a case based language. Only from what I have seen it is the definite and indefinite articles that morphs as opposed to the noun in Russian. Also, changes only occur with the masculine definite and indefinite article, der and ein such as
Ich habe einen Hund or Ich sehe den Hund.
Ich habe einen Hund means I have a dog.
Iche sehe den Hun means I see te dog.
Kein also is affected.
example: Ich habe keinen Hund I don't have a dog.
Not exactly. In the accusative case masculine words are the only ones affected, but in dative and genitive feminine and neutrum nouns are affected to, e.g.Quote:
Originally Posted by mp510
Ich spiele mit dem Kind
Ich helfe der Frau
Your sentences are completely correct though :)
Thanks. i didn't know that!Quote:
Originally Posted by Kamion
Finnish, Hungarian and Estonian (all in the same family) have some 20 odd cases each.
They are easier to use than Russian cases however.
If I use Hungarian as an example:
Instead of using prepositions, endings are added to nouns.
E.g.
Magyarorsz
That's interesting. When you see the word 'case' you tend to assume the worst :)
Romanian has 5 cases though for nouns there are only 3 different forms AFAIK (nominative/accusative, genetive/dative, vocative).
Not all languages have declension classes but all languages have cases (properly case forms—cases are the specific roles of nouns and expressions with substantival force, and those nouns and expressions themselves). Turkish and Finnish are agglutinating languages, so their case-forming suffixes vary only according to phonetic considerations (e.g. vowel harmony and voicing assimilation of consonants), not according to declension patterns.
Hebrew does not have cases either.
Certain nouns change as well (some masculine nouns ending in -e or even with no ending):Quote:
Originally Posted by mp510
ein Knabe, eines Knabens, einem Knaben, einen Knaben
Although Finnish language has more cases - they are much easier than Russian. Don't remember all the rules/casesQuote:
Originally Posted by fantom605
e.g.
Suomi (Finland) - Suomessa - in Finland, Suomesta - from Finland
Japanese has sort of cases:
watashi (私)
watashi-wa and watashi-ga - Nominative
watashi-no Genitive
watashi-ni Dative
watashi-wo Accusative
watashi-yori - than me (comparison)
watashi-kara - from me
watashi-mo - including me, me too
watashi-made - up-to me
Yes, except for Bulgarian and Macedonian. They have no cases. Another important difference - these 2 languages are the only ones among Slavic languages to have the notion of a definite article.Quote:
Originally Posted by kamka
The 7th case is Vocative(?) used in addressing. Russian has only some attavisms of this form.
See the following examples of vocatives in Russian:
бог - боже (God) (quite common - Боже мой!- My God!)
отец - отче (Father) (used in prayers)
Vocative is quite common in Ukrainian - мамо, дiду, хлопче, etc.