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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   4725 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for November 19, 2023

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

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Question for Motteizeans who natively speak a language with cases(I know we have at least a few Russians and East Indians and one German, Finn, and Hungarian apiece)- in English, there's a pattern of young speakers mistaking cases which is shared with more-poorly educated ones, eg "Me and John got a burger" where the correct would be "John and I got a burger".

Is difficulty with cases English specific? I am a fluent Spanish speaker and it seems like most people speaking Spanish have no difficulty distinguishing "yo" from "me", but I also don't interact with children in it very much compared to in English and most of my Spanish communication is relatively unambiguous and/or omits or implies pronouns, either because of the verb or because it's obvious from context. I have some experience communicating in Latin but we can assume people who know Latin to be IQ selected and also using careful phrasing- does the average Russian or Tamil or Finn have some trouble figuring out how to use cases growing up, and is making errors with it a hallmark of a stupid or poorly educated speaker(which statistically must exist) as opposed to simply a second language speaker(which there are probably also plenty of)?

Turkish has a case system that can be quite daunting for learners (not because we have weird cases but because of how they interact with the whole suffix based grammar). Natives definitely get them wrong quite often, but when you hear someone make a mistake it’s always very obvious and a bit cringing. A common failure in Turkish is it’s tempting to make very long sentences where the grammar pieces interacting with each other are very far apart from each other. Then you just start forgetting and mixing up cases. If I am writing a formal text then I will definitely vocalise long sentences in my head while proofreading to make sure they sound correct.

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