A seeming peculiarity of English is that our pronouns change according to their meaning in the sentence. She doesn't love he, she loves him. Why does 'he' change to 'him?'
This is a concept known as noun cases. Old English, Modern English's grandfather language, used such cases for all nouns. Many modern languages still do so. Grasping the concept of nominative, genitive, dative or accusative noun cases can add a great deal of difficulty for English speakers trying to learn German, Russian, or any number of languages that did not simplify their noun cases over the years in the same way that English did. Finnish has around 14 noun cases!
A proper understanding of our pronouns, which still use noun cases, can not only make learning other languages easier but provide some interesting linguistic insight into our own language! We tend to convert our pronouns instinctively, without much thought to it. Let's take a deep dive into the noun cases that remain in the language and see how they function.
Nominative nouns represent the subject of the sentence. They are also usually the unchanged version of the noun. 'I', 'you', 'he', 'she', 'it', 'we', 'you', and 'they' are the nominative pronouns in English.
Genitive nouns show possession. 'My', 'your', 'his', 'her', 'its', 'our', 'your', and 'their' are the genitive forms of our pronouns. The genitive case is one case that actually does extend to other nouns in Modern English. We form this case, generally, by adding 's to a noun. For example, "This is Frank's book." lets us know that the book is a possession of Frank.
Accusative nouns indicate the object of a sentence. 'Me', 'you', 'him', 'her', 'it', 'us', 'you', and 'them' are the accusative versions of our pronouns. And now we know why she loves 'him' instead of 'he'. Because he is the object of the sentence, the word 'him' is used to reference him.
Dative nouns refer to the indirect object of a sentence. Old English differentiated between dative and accusative nouns. Modern English does not. Even the pronouns dropped this case as the language evolved.
We no longer need such cases to get our point across because Modern English relies heavily on word order and context. The sentence, "Him loves she," is not grammatically correct. If we were to hear it, we would think the person is trying to say that he loves her. In other languages, less reliant of word order, that would be a perfectly correct sentence meaning the same thing as, "She loves him". We know from the noun cases that 'she' is the subject word, and 'him' is the object word. Absent word order requirements, it is a perfectly correct sentence.
There is one more case that existed in Old English, the instrumental case. This case indicated that a noun was an instrument or a means of accomplishing something. It is included last because it cannot be replaced with word order or context alone. Instead, it was replaced with the use of prepositions. In the sentence, "He hit the ball with the bat," the bat is the instrument. The words 'with the' indicate to us what the instrumental case would have indicated to speakers of Old English. Some languages have many cases that serve the same function as our prepositions do.
So there's our blast from the linguistic past. The earliest form of English required that all nouns change their case to indicate their role in a sentence. Over time, the accusative, dative, and instrumental cases were dropped and the genitive case was simplified. For whatever reason, pronouns retained their usage of the accusative.
2 February 2021 | grammar |
Cleaning from New Year's Day to year's end, it all gets scrubbed regularly (10)
Answer: JANITORIAL
1 January 2021 | crossword, puzzle, happy new year |
Man remembered on Boxing Day taking walk with female (7)
Answer: STEPHEN
26 December 2020 | crossword, puzzle, christmas |
Woman of the upper classes, friend when Christmas comes round (8)
Answer: ANNUALLY
25 December 2020 | crossword, puzzle, christmas |
Many of the words used in today's English language can be traced back to French, Greek, Latin, German, Spanish, and many other languages. Each word has its own genetic makeup that is specifically unique to that one word.These tiny stories are known as Etymology, the study of the origins of words. Below are four words that have interesting stories.
Jumbo
The word Jumbo means extremely large. The word began its call to fame with Jumbo the elephant. In 1882, Jumbo was the world's most famous elephant. Full grown, Jumbo stood twelve and a half feet tall and weighed seven tons. He was the biggest elephant the world had ever seen. On any given day he could eat a barrel of potatoes, 200 pounds of hay, half a barrel of oats, 15 bread loaves, and the occasional whiskey drink. Jumbo became much more a name, it became a word used to describe anything abnormally large like Jumbo the elephant.
Marathon
The word marathon makes its first appearance on the beach of Marathon. In 490 BC, a Persian army decided to be the first to conquer Athens. So they planned to land on the beach of Marathon, kill the entire Athens army, then swing around to the south side and loot the city. It should have been an easy victory, 25,000 Persians against 10,000 Athens. The Athens, realizing that they were completely outnumbered, begged for help from Sparta. Athens sent a military messenger, Pheidippides, to seek help. He ran 140 miles to Sparta, but Sparta refused to send help because they were in the middle of a religious holiday. So Pheidippides ran back.
When Pheidippides returned, Athens decided to just charge into battle. The Persians were completely caught by surprise and suffered massive losses that ended in a retreat.However, they were determined to sack Athens before they fled. On ships, the Persians would have taken 8 hours to reach Athens. Pheidippides sprinted the 26.2 miles all the way to Athens to warn of the oncoming army. On completing his mission, Pheidippides promptly died.
The Athens army had jogged behind Pheidippides to defend their city, battle-weary and exhausted. The Persians arrived and saw the tired troops of Athens waiting for them. They came to the conclusion that these Greeks were either demigods or supernatural beings, and decided they did not want to risk angering the gods. Hence the story behind the word marathon.
Clue
In Greek times, clue was actually spelled as clew and had a completely different meaning. Clew came from the Greek language meaning a ball of yarn. The meaning changed as it was adopted by the English language based on the Greek story of an evil king named Minos and his son, the Minotaur. Minos had built a labyrinth, and every seven years he required a sacrifice of 14 young men and women to be thrown into the labyrinth. No one ever returned from the labyrinth. Then one year a demigod named Theseus decided enough was enough, he was going to kill the Minotaur. Along the way. Minos' daughter fell heels over head in love with him and gave him a clew so that he could find his way out of the labyrinth. Theseus slew the Minotaur and used the clew to escape the depths of the labyrinth. The clew became known as the ball of yarn that points the way, a rough definition of the word clue.
Cell
The smallest building block of any organism is a cell. A scientist by the name of Robert Hooke was very curious about microscopes and designed better microscopes that allowed the viewer to view objects with a magnitude of 50x. He became the first person, in 1665, to actually see a cell. He thought they looked much like cells in prison and named them such. The name has stuck ever since.
22 September 2020 | english history, etymology |
