Fun with Czech! [cont. from p.94] #projectPrague
Yesterday's Czech lesson was in the Locative case.
Locative, lokál, the declension for the state of being in a location. Used only after v (in), na (on or to), po (past, after, on, to, for, by - yes, all of them), při (by, nearby, with) & o (about, with). Although s is normally "with". Except if the word starts with a vowel, then it's se, ( Read more... )
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(And most Brits are the same with English - we learn through usage and exposure, and we don't tend to understand tenses and cases and how they all together except that some sound right and some don't. I've even had someone tell me that English doesn't do that kind of thing!
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I naïvely thought that in languages with really complex gender or case systems, though -- like Hungarian's 22 cases or kiSwahili's 17 kinda-sorta-genders -- that people would have to learn the rules just to be able to do it.
But they don't. We have amazingly capable language centres able to incorporate and apply apparently arbitrarily-complex rule-sets in real time as we go, without any awareness. Stuff just sounds right or not.
I think this is part of why AAVE's different patterns of nominative/accusative pronouns so upset speakers of more standard English idiolects. We just instinctively _know_ what "sounds right" and when someone doesn't do it, consistently and deliberately, it's upsetting.
http://www.itchyfeetcomic.com/2016/01/ideal-critic.html
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Which is why, I think, that lots of writers talk about the experience of it feeling like something writing through them. They've found a way of hooking up the sentence-producing part of the brain to the typing part of the brain, leaving the conscious part to simply observe and occasionally comment on things.
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I'm reminded of a greek workmate who wanted to know "is it 'daily automated releases' or 'automated daily releases'?" Which led to a discussion about what order adjectives come in English.
"It doesn't matter"
"It does. I spend a 6 months of English classes learning them"
"It doesn't"
"OK then is it 'big red ball' or 'red big ball'?"
"Oh my god"
British people don't need to know or learn the rules because they've got a fully trained neural net reinforced every day with the correct ordering of adjectives. To the extent that the only way for me to tell you the rules is to try saying each combination out loud and see which one sounds right.
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Sorry for all the hassle I inadvertently put you through.
OK, mea culpa. Because nobody I've asked except perhaps my teacher Lucie and you knows this stuff, I wrongly assumed that it was like English teaching and it wasn't taught. My bad.
I do know the numbers, thanks to my NGDAVLI mnemonic, but it's an additional conversion step. I also have tried to memorise the list of questions, but it doesn't help a foreign learner at all. If you know the endings, the questions let you ID the case. But I don't know the endings; I need to perform a (fully-conscious) grammatical analysis first, work out subject, object, type of object, take a guess at the gender and the role, and then try to remember an appropriate ending for that case in that gender in that number.
The little questions are just kicking me in the guts while I am already on the ground struggling. They are more work, not a hand up.
It's a bit like waistcoastmark said above: how an Anglophone tells "he" from "him" is ( ... )
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