Lesson 9 – Nouns (basics, declension)

It's been a long time since my last grammar post. Wow, I could hear your heartbeat speed up.

As I have promised, I'm going to dedicate this article to the nouns of our model sentence. Let's check it out.

We now know which two words create the ZSD together. (If you don't, go back here.) One of them, the subject, is a noun (or a pronoun). If you've read the Lesson 7 carefully, you know that the subject can only be in the first case. So "pes" (="a dog") is a noun in its basic form, nominative (the first) case. (If you don't see why, just look at this sentence: "I'm going shopping." The subject is "I" and, as you can see, it's not inflected. How do you know? Well, the English language evolved from Latin and German and there are still some "anachronisms" or relics which include the declension of pronouns. It's not a big deal, really, but every time you want to say "I" in a different place than as a subject you say "me". That's it. If you'd use "me" in English, it's the sign that the Czech word is inflected.) 

What about the object? That's tricky. Let's write down what we know. It's a noun.... Man, we don't know much about it. Let me give you a hint. Check out the list of prepositions for each case mentioned in the Lesson 7. Now look at the preposition in our model sentence. It's "s" (="with") which indicates which case? The instrumental (seventh)! Great, now how do we find out the gender, number and the paradigm? I'm sorry to disappoint you but no how. There’s no way of figuring it out. I decided to make it easier for you by using the word "kost" (=bone) which is a paradigm itself. But still you have to know which paradigm the noun belongs to. This has an advantage, though. If you memorize the paradigm, you don't have to learn the gender because each gender has its own group of paradigms. 

"Kost" is neuter and singular. Why do I refer to the object of our model sentence as "kost" not "kostí"? It's not a typo. The word "kost" is in the nominative (first) case which means it's in its basic form. When I talk about a word I shouldn't use the inflected forms because it's confusing. (Now that I'm talking about "confusing", I should mention that diacritics are pretty important because "kostí" is the seventh case of the word "kost" whereas "kosti" is a plural form of the word "kost".)

I've nothing more to tell you about this since all you need to know are the suffixes which you just have to memorize.

It's been a lot of information in the last few lessons, I'll make a conversational one next time! (:

love & peace

Ciray