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

Lesson 7– Grammar (cases, declension of nouns)

Let's move on. There are lots of things to learn. :)

You don't have to learn anything from this yet. I just want you to understand, what it means. Enjoy!

Introduction: What are the grammatical cases?

Today's lesson is about grammatical cases. I can hear you saying: "I don't need them, they'll understand me anyway." Yes, we do understand but if you put some effort into learning them, it will pay off.

If you speak Finnish, German, Sanskrit, or Latin (or any other inflected language), you will probably find it easier to learn than those who don't even know what "grammatical cases" actually mean.

For those who don't know what they are (yes, they, there's a lot of them):

When you say: "I drank a cup of tea," the subject "I" is in its basic form (nominative case).

If you say: "The cup of tea drank me," (ok, perhaps you don't say this) the object "me" is declined.

English doesn't use the declension of nouns, pronouns, numerals and adjectives (except for exceptions). The German language has four cases and they are markedly easier than the Czech ones because you only have genders as the deciding factor for the type of declension (der, die, das [ein, eine, ein]).

To explain the system in the Czech language, I'll use Latin as an example: When you learn a list of nouns, apart from the gender, you have to memorize their suffixes in the genitive case, too. This is the way to find out how to decline a word. But I'll provide you with some tips to help you with recognizing it.

POI: Both Latin and Czech have 7 grammatical cases.

The Czech system of noun declension

As I mentioned before, the Czech language has seven grammatical cases. Is it too many for you? Try learning Finnish. As you may know, almost every noun (not all!) has a simple form and a plural form. If you can multiply, you already know, that we've got to the final number of suffixes a noun can have. It's fourteen. 

Shall I tell you the total of all of the suffixes? Sure, but if you get discouraged easily, don't read it. It should be 196 plus some exceptions. You don't need to faint right now. Let me finish. 

It's 56 for feminine, 56 for neutrum, and as usual, men just have to complicate everything– so it's 84 for masculine. 

Feminine gender has four paradigms of noun declension. These are: žena (woman), růže (rose), píseň (song), and kost (bone), (škola [school], ves [village]).

Neutrum– four paradigms: město (town), moře (sea), kuře (chicken), and stavení (building).

Masculine– six paradigms: pán (sir, lord), hrad (castle), muž (man), stroj (engine, machine), předseda (chairman), soudce (judge), (kůň [horse],divák [spectator], zámek [lock, chateau], otec [father]); they are divided into two groups: animate (pán, muž, předseda, soudce, host, kůň, otec) and inaminate (hrad, stroj, zámek)– this makes no difference, as regards the noun declension. 

NOTE: The paradigms in brackets are declined the same way as one of the regular paradigms but at least one of the suffixes is different. (hrad– zámek, žena– škola, pán– host).

The seven cases

They have names that you don't have to learn, I'll refer to them as the first, the second, the third, the fourth, the fifth, the sixth, and the seventh case. But if you're the kind of a language geek I like, you'll definitely find it useful. 

1.     Nominative

2.     Genitive 

3.     Dative

4.     Accusative

5.     Vocative

6.     Locative

7.     Instrumental

How to figure out, which of the cases should be used

Ta žena dostala růži. (= That woman (has/had) received a rose.) As you can see, a subject of a sentence is always in the first (nominative) case. Who (has/had) received a rose? That woman. The object "růži" is in the forth (accusative) case. Unfortunately, there is no way of recognizing the case immediately. One thing you can say for sure is that the object is never in the first (nominative) case (but of course, there's one exception). The Czechs have a list of questions (and prepositions, in some cases) as a "helping tool", but for you, it's useless because it doesn't tell you much. When you start to think like Czechs, (congrats and) you can check it out. The list is consisted of questions you ask about the object, e. g. "What did (or has/had) that woman receive(-d)?" 

1.     Nominative– Kdo? Co? (=Who? What?) (Asking about the object to find out, whether it's animate or inanimate.)

2.     Genitive– Bez/z koho/čeho? (=Without/out of/from whom/what?) 

3.     Dative– Komu? Čemu? (=To whom/what? [Example: Give it to her.])

4.     Accusative– Koho? Co? (=Whom? What? [Example: Do it for me.])

5.     Vocative– Oslovujeme, voláme. (=We address, we call. This is a case for addressing. Ex.: Man!)

6.     Locative– O kom/čem? (=About who/what?)

7.     Instrumental– S kým/čím? (=With who/what?)

For foreigners, there are lists of prepositions for each case.

To be continued...

Biz,

Ciray