What language has the most grammar?
With less than a thousand speakers, Tuyuca is considered the world's most complex language. It is named after the ethnic group whose people are its native speakers. It is spoken in a few areas of Brazil and Colombia. It has up to 140 noun classes and each of them are indicated by a different suffix and prefix.
What languages have no grammatical cases?
Which languages don't have cases? Spanish, Italian, Catalan, Dutch, Vietnamese, Mandarin, and Indonesian are among some of the languages that don't have cases.
Does French have grammatical cases?
By contrast, cases don't really exist in French. At least, that may be what you've been told. The truth is, there are some words in French (and English) that change according to case. Most notably, pronouns.
How many grammatical cases does English have?
There are only three cases in modern English, they are subjective (he), objective (him) and possessive (his). They may seem more familiar in their old English form - nominative, accusative and genitive. There is no dative case in modern English.
What language has no gender?
There are some languages that have no gender! Hungarian, Estonian, Finnish, and many other languages don't categorize any nouns as feminine or masculine and use the same word for he or she in regards to humans.
What is the easiest language to learn?
15 of the easiest languages to learn for English speakers - rankedFrisian. Frisian is thought to be one of the languages most closely related to English, and therefore also the easiest for English-speakers to pick up. ... Dutch. ... Norwegian. ... Spanish. ... Portuguese. ... Italian. ... French. ... Swedish.More items...•
How many cases does German have?
four casesThere are four cases in German: nominative (subject), accusative (direct object), dative (indirect object), and genitive (possessive).
How many cases does Spanish have?
There are five Cases, the right [nominative], the generic [genitive], the dative, the accusative, and the vocative.
How hard is French grammar?
Is French Grammar Easy? Many people choose to learn French over other languages because they've heard that French grammar is relatively easy to learn. While it's true that French grammar rules aren't necessarily hard, they do take patience and practice to master, just like with any new skill.
How many grammatical cases does Russian have?
six casesThe Russian language has six cases to show what function a noun has in a sentence: nominative, genitive, dative, accusative, instrumental, and prepositional.
How many grammatical cases does Chinese have?
one grammatical formThe language almost entirely lacks inflection; words typically have only one grammatical form.
Does Japanese have a case system?
Grammatical case Grammatical cases in Japanese are marked by particles placed after the nouns. A distinctive feature of Japanese is the presence of two cases which are roughly equivalent to the nominative case in other languages: one representing the sentence topic, other representing the subject.
Does Italian have grammatical cases?
In Italian language there are four cases, that describe functions of nouns, pronouns and noun phrases, marking whether they are the subject or a subordinate object in the clause. All the cases in Italian language are conveyed by prepositions and pronouns in one of their grammatical forms.
Does Spanish have cases?
Spanish cases do exist but they don't always change the form of the noun or pronoun. Even if you don't need to alter words to make them fit into a case, knowing what function a word is serving in a sentence can be quite beneficial.
Does every language case?
Case will work differently in each language, so here are some things to look out for! How many cases does the language have? Some languages, like Chinese, have no cases at all, and others, like Hungarian, can have more than a dozen! Russian and Latin have six cases (and used to have more!), and German has four.
When did English lose grammatical cases?
But English's process of simplifying its inflections reached full tilt in the 11th, 12th, and 13th centuries, from which, yes, we do have extensive documentation of the language.
Which languages have cases?
Central and Eastern European languages almost always have cases (including the non-Indo-European languages like Hungarian and Estonian), although Bulgarian does not except for the vocative. Austronesian: In the Austronesian languages, only the ones in the islands of East and Southeast Asia tend to have a case system.
What are some examples of heavy case languages?
Languages used as an example of heavy case languages are often Uralic, usually Finnish and Hungarian. As for Finnish, one factor having increased the number of cases is the expanded locative system. Instead of one or two locatives, Finnish has several of them. Let's see Finnish as an example of the question why there are so many cases. The example word in the following is talo meaning 'house'.
How many cases are there in Indo-European?
Indo-European has anywhere from none to 8 cases. Proto-Indo-European had 8 cases, and that survived into Sanskrit, and until today in the Baltic languages (Latvian and Lithuanian), but in many languages cases have either diminished or disappeared. I don’t know that any have developed many new cases (although Hindi and related languages have ergative alignment in the past, so that’s like a new case in a way). The question for the answer I linked to above ( How do linguists determine whether a language is agglutinative or it has postpositions?) discussed Urdu having a lot of cases and post-positions and having it be difficult to tell which is which, so under some analysis there might be a lot of cases in Urdu (and Hindi, etc.).
What are the real questions that must be faced with linguists analyzing languages?
These are the real questions that must be faced with any language like Tsez.
How many Finnish noun cases are there?
There are 15 Finnish noun cases. Udmurt has 16, and there are even more (18+) in Hungarian: Uralic languages #Typology:
How many cases are there in Tsez?
If we have to go for one single language, then I'd plump for Tsez, with upwards of 252 cases (or better: case combinations).
What suffix is used for casehood?
A few other suffixes are good candidates for casehood, including an indigent case ('lacking'), a descriptive case ('characterized by'), and at least two different equative cases, one of which can attach to all other cases except the absolutive.
Place and time
Note: Most cases used for location and motion can be used for time as well.
Morphosyntactic alignment
For meanings of the terms agent, patient, experiencer, and instrument, see thematic relation .
Why is it so hard to learn a language with grammatical cases?
The biggest drawback of learning a language with grammatical cases is that the grammar can seem especially complex and foreign in comparison to English. It often takes a new student longer to reach a basic conversational level when using cases than if they were learning a language that didn’t have any. However once you’re over the hump of remembering and understanding your language’s case system, the difficulty wears off and it begins to feel more natural.
What are cases?
When a language uses grammatical cases it means that nouns and pronouns will change their form (case) depending on their relationship to the rest of a sentence. We can see this a little bit in the English language.
Why do we use word order in English?
In English we use word order to help determine how different words function within a sentence. For example:
Can you learn grammatical cases?
Unfortunately there isn’t any shortcut to language learning that can propel you quickly and painlessly through a case system. One way or another you will simply have to study and practice using cases until they become second nature. That being said, there are some effective ways to learn grammatical cases while keeping things interesting.
Do you use "a" or "the" in case based language?
Some (but not all) case based languages don’t use articles like “a” and “the”. On one hand, this can make things a little easier because you won’t have to worry about remembering which article agrees with the number or gender of the noun you’re using. On the other hand, if you’re used to the English language, it will probably take some time to get used to the absence of articles. For awhile you will speak and often feel like something is missing from the sentence.
Can you memorize a language?
In the midst of studying and trying to remember the grammar and vocabulary in a new language, sometimes it’s easy to forget that you actually need to use the language to get better at it. Memorization on its own will not be enough to help master your new language. At some point you will need to practice what you learn.
Which languages don't have cases?
Spanish, Italian, Catalan, Dutch, Vietnamese, Mandarin, and Indonesian are among some of the languages that don’t have cases.
What does "cases" mean in a language?
It means that you have to study several versions of every noun you learn in a language with cases. In a language like Croatian ,where you’re already dealing with gender and plural forms of words, cases add a whole new dynamic to the memorization of vocabulary and grasping even basic grammar. Cases can be pretty intimidating for someone who doesn’t ...
What are some of the different cases?
I’ve included this section just to provide a description of a few of the different cases. There are, of course, more than what’s listed here, and the descriptions I’ve included are really simplified versions of the rules that surround cases. The ways in which cases are used vary from language to language, and they can be significantly more complex than what’s below.
How to change a sentence from "my mom gave me some pears" to "my mom gave some pears?
One way is by throwing in a preposition. In another language, changing the sentence from “My mom gave me some pears” to or from “my mom gave some pears to me” can make your life simpler.
How many cases are there in Tamil?
Tamil does not have that many cases, actually. Traditionally it's described as an 8-cases language (like your list, like Sanskrit), but it's a bad description, actually. There's no way to avoid cases in languages that have them. You cannot say even "I'm drinking coffee" without a basic knowledge of the accusative case.
What is a case in English?
Cases are the grammatical function of a noun or pronoun within a phrase, clause, or sentence. To use English as an example, it’s essentially the difference between I and me, he and him, she and her. “I fell in love with him” or “He fell in love with me.” It helps indicate who or what is doing the action and who or what it’s being done to.
How many languages are there in West Greenlandic?
Polish, Czech, Serbian, and Croatian have 7. Latin and Russian have between 5 and 6. Romanian has 5. German, Icelandic, and Modern Greek have 4.
What is Grammatical Case?
Grammatical case is a linguistic feature that changes the form (morphology) of a word to denote the “role” that that word plays in a sentence.
How many cases are there in English?
English has three cases (nominative, accusative, and genitive) which are most often reflected in a three-way distinction in pronouns ( he, him, and his, for example). The easiest to understand at a glance is the genitive case, which we use to denote possession.
What does a case mean in a sentence?
Most cases indicate roles like the subject of a sentence ( nominative), the direct object of a verb ( accusative ), and the indirect object of a verb ( dative ), among many others. Case systems are relatively common globally, but vary from the extremely simple to the extremely complex.
How to master cases as a child?
If you want to master cases as a child does, then you must modify your approach so that you learn like they do. This means that you must focus on learning grammar from language (and not the other way around), derive patterns from multiple contexts, and speak early and often, using feedback to minimize your errors.
How to learn a word?
When learning a word, look for how it appears in different contexts and situations - Grammatical case is all about the role a word plays in a sentence. This means that from sentence to sentence, the same word can be used in a number of different ways, with a number of different case endings. So, when adding a word to your mental vocabulary, never settle on a single example of the word as proof of how that word works in all contexts. Instead, look for other places the word is used. Focus on how it changes from one situation to the next. If possible, try to build a repertoire of example sentences and write them down, so that you better understand how the word works on a holistic level.
What languages have a tone system?
Some languages, like Vietnamese, Thai, and most Chinese languages, have a tone system, adding a new layer of difficulty to speaking a language correctly. Other languages, like Japanese, Mandarin Chinese, and Cantonese, have a character-based writing system which often stymies the efforts of new learners to read and write.
Why is it so hard to learn cases?
As you know now, any difficulty you have with cases is simply due to the fact that they are unfamiliar, and difficult to learn with a mature, grammar-based approach. Children with a lot less life experience than you have can master cases just fine.
Which language family has no gender?
Certain language families, such as the Austronesian, Turkic and Uralic, Farsi language families , usually have no grammatical genders (see genderless language ). Many indigenous American languages (across language families) have no grammatical gender.
What languages are masculine, feminine, and neuter?
Masculine, feminine, and neuter. Most of these languages are Indo-European. Proto-Indo-European originally had two genders (animate and inanimate), and later the animate split into masculine and feminine, and the inanimate became neuter. Asturian - Masculine, feminine and neuter for uncountable nouns. Belarusian.
What are the three gendered pronouns?
Kurdish (Central and Southern Dialects only.) Nepali (Has gendered pronouns but no grammatical genders.) Odia.
What is Georgian verb?
Georgian - different verbs are used in various cases (to put, to take, to have etc.), while referring to animate or inanimate objects. Many Native American languages, including most languages of the Algic, Siouan and Uto-Aztecan language families, as well as isolates such as Mapudungun. Middle Korean. Sumerian.
What is the pronoun for "ho" in Catalan?
Catalan - although it has the pronoun "ho" which substitutes antecedents with no gender, like a subordinate clause or a neuter demonstrative ("això", "allò"). For example: "vol això" (he wants this)→"ho vol" (he wants it), or "ha promès que vindrà" (he has promised he will come)→"ho ha promès" (he has promised it).
When did Chinese pronouns start?
Modern written Chinese ( Sino-Tibetan) has gendered pronouns introduced in the 1920s to accommodate the translation of Western literature (see Chinese pronouns ), which do not appear in spoken Chinese. Even in written language it doesn’t have grammatical gender in the sense of noun class distinctions.
Which language has gender superclassing?
Many Australian languages have a system of gender superclassing in which membership in one gender can mean membership in another. Kannada: Originally had 9 gender pronouns but only 3 exist at present. Zande: Masculine, feminine, animate, and inanimate. Bantu languages have many noun classes.
