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[calime]

Gacked from tazlet

Your Vocabulary Score: A

Congratulations on your multifarious vocabulary! You must be quite an erudite person.

How's Your Vocabulary?

Hmmm...not bad for a non-native speaker.

You paid attention during 97% of high school!

85-100% You must be an autodidact, because American high schools don't get scores that high! Good show, old chap!

Do you deserve your high school diploma?
Create a Quiz

Umm. Might be because I didn't go to an American high school.

WTF is a dangling modifier?
A-ha!http://owl.english.purdue.edu/handouts/grammar/g_dangmod.html
Ok. I HATED the grammar in school - as a separate study thing I mean, the collection of weirdly named rules to just learn by heart. English, Russian, Estonian grammar, no diff. Loved the languages and lit and translation though. But I've done my best to try to forget all the grammar terminology, I mean, Estonian language alone has 14 cases and I think it is rather enough to be using them in everyday speech. One does not need to slot them into rules and name them, for chrissakes!

Comments

[calime]

I suspect it might be abit similar to me discovering statistics and what a wonderful thing it is:)
But, as to 14 cases, I'll quote Wiki:"...Typologically, Estonian represents a transitional form from an agglutinating language to an inflected language. Over the course of Estonian history, German has exercised a strong influence on Estonian, both in vocabulary and syntax.

In Estonian nouns and pronouns do not have grammatical gender, but nouns and adjectives decline in fourteen cases: nominative, genitive, partitive, illative, inessive, elative, allative, adessive, ablative, translative, terminative, essive, abessive, and comitative, with the case and number of the adjective(s) always agreeing with that of the noun (except in the terminative, essive, abessive and comitative, where there is agreement only for the number, the adjective being in the genitive form). Thus the illative for "a yellow house" (kollane maja) — "into a yellow house" is (kollasesse majja).

The direct object of the verb appears either in the accusative (for total objects) or in the partitive (for partial objects). The accusative coincides with the genitive in the singular and with nominative in the plural. Accusative vs. partitive case opposition of object used with transitive verbs creates a telicity contrast, just as in Finnish. This is a rough equivalent of the perfect vs. imperfect aspect opposition.

The verbal system lacks a distinctive future tense (the present tense serves here) and features special forms to express an action performed by an undetermined subject (the "impersonal")...."

Apparently, when Methos was young, we had only 7 cases. Can't imagine wehre we went wrong in the meantime *sigh*. Of course, Finnish has either 15 or 16 cases (I forget which is correct), so they've screwed up even more *grin*.

Also, if you're interested, some links:
http://www.ecml.at/html/estonian/html/8online_resources.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estonian_language
http://www.alphadictionary.com/directory/Languages/Uralic/Estonian/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uralic_languages
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finnish_language
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proto-Finno-Ugric
http://virtual.finland.fi/netcomm/news/showarticle.asp?intNWSAID=25832

[calime]

And, just for fun, the 14 cases in Estonian would look like this:
Nimetav
Omastav
Osastav
Sisseütlev
Seesütlev
Seestütlev
Alaleütlev
Alalütlev
Alaltütlev
Saav
Rajav
Olev
Ilmaütlev
Kaasaütlev

Well, and because we usualy don't learn at school the latin-derived terminology for grammar, it's not very easy for me to get a grip of it in English later:)

[ceruleancat.livejournal.com]

Mon Dieu!

You know I will ask you to demonstrate these and explain the usage of each, right?

Apparently, when Methos was young, we had only 7 cases. Can't imagine wehre we went wrong in the meantime
I suspect you went wrong when you became more influenced by Finnish, but that's only a thoroughly unsubstantiated, off-the-cuff assumption.

[calime]

Well, if you're interested, with pleasure:D
And dunno if your idea is right...Finnish is actually considered to be a more archaic form than Estonian.

[ceruleancat.livejournal.com]

Where I am, linguistics is fun.

It doesn't matter that it's considered more archaic. Related languages can develop differently and then influence each other at later stages in different ways.

[holde-maid.livejournal.com]

Over the course of Estonian history, German has exercised a strong influence on Estonian, both in vocabulary and syntax.

What? I'm innocent! My language sure didn't infect your mother-tongue with a cancerous growth of cases! We only have 4! *LOL*

According to Wiki, Finnish has 15. :-)

[calime]

I discovered (also according to wiki) that the 16th case is only used in some Eastern Finnish dialects, and it's the same that we officialy don't have in Est, though we use it colloquially:). It's an arcahaic one.