It is inflected and yes it does have cases. You don’t say Me think, do you? Why? Because me is the object case. Subject case is I, of course. You use the genitive every time you say my house, and nouns do decline: foot, feet, etc. Verbs conjugate as a form of inflection: I walk, she walks, etc.
Like most people I say “you and me both think…” but when I want to be taken very
seriously I say “You and I both think…”
I had a girlfriend who in certain circumstances would say
“Me doesn’t like that.” or “Me likes that.” It was intended to be cute - it was.
In Greek the inflection caries the meaning and the word order caries
emphasis.
In English the word order caries the meaning and non standard uses of words like
me simply give a different emphasis - they never change the meaning.
I was just reading about this an hour ago in Sidgwick. He says for Greek word order is determined by “clearness: emphasis: neatness and euphony…Clearness is the chief thing…In a Latin sentence you have to think about balance and point and marshalling of verbs and so forth…A common mistake…is … for example that notion (derived from Latin) that all verbs must be at the end of the clauses…”
euphony is also a significant factor in Greek word order.
I didn’t know that, thanks.
And it is also true that I overstated things a little it isn’t quite true that you can jumble up all the
words of a sentence and for the meaning to remain unaffected. However, whenever I have
been completely stumped by a Greek sentence, the problem has always been that I have
been allowing the meaning I get from English word order to override what the inflections
are telling me.
thank you laura so much.. would you by any chance be able to point me to a similar list of “old Greek readers”, where the material is easier, and one can start there first and build up, before moving up to the classics – in a similar way to the process you’re describing for Latin?
I studied Latin in high school for four or five years, doing it for my HSC. I’ve studied Attic Greek for precisely two years (this is my second). I find Greek much, much easier to read than Latin. I can’t tell you why. On the other hand, writing Latin comes much easier to me. There came a point where I thought I even started to think in Latin.
First, let me put in my two cents on the matter of case distinction in Greek and Latin as compared to languages. As I see it, all languages have case, even ones like Mandarin Chinese. What makes the difference is how case is indicated (i.e. morphologically as in Latin or Greek vs. syntactically as in English or Chinese). English speakers often have difficulty when they’re first learning case declension systems not because case doesn’t exist in English but because their familiar word-order-based method of indicating case leaves them with the illusion that it’s something entirely new and foreign. In other words, they confuse the underlying concept of case with the morphological method of marking case.
Also, don’t confuse verb tenses with distinct verb forms. In Latin, for example, there are, I believe, six tenses, three moods, and two voices. It’s the Battleship-style cross-multiplication of these three categories that creates the myriad of forms.
No English does not have cases, end of story. Of course it has the same functions as cases (i.e showing subject/object, possession etc) and has specific markers and word order to flag this up but to say it has actual cases, a morphological feature, is wrong. It’s an analytical language.
Yes, English is an analytical language. That is indisputable. What I’m saying is that all languages distinguish different roles for substantives (nouns, pronouns, and adjectives). No language can function as such without at least the simplest possible set of distinct roles.
Perhaps the issue is that my definition of “case” differs from the generally accepted one. To me, “case” is simply the role that a substantive plays relative to other components in the sentence of which it is part, not to be confused with the specific means of representing that role in a given language. By this logic, “analytic” then means “marking case implicitly through syntax” (rather than “lacking case altogether”) while “synthetic” means “marking case explicitly through morphology.”
Since your definition appears to be the widely held one, you are academically correct, so I’ll cede the point. I just think that this narrower definition leaves speakers of an analytical language who wish to learn a synthetic language at a conceptual disadvantage.
Anyway, back to the main topic at hand, I am on chapter 14 of H&Q, and I can see how reading Greek might actually be a bit easier than reading Latin (all those ambiguous datives/ablatives throw me off too). Still, from an overall grammatical/morphological perspective, my own opinion is that Greek is easily harder. Six principal parts, separate subjunctive and optative moods, various exceptions/subdivisions of the third declension, morphological distinction of middle and passive voices in the future and aorist, etc.
Of course, some of my difficulty may stem from the fact that I studied Latin and three of its descendants before turning to Greek. Greek grammar seems to violate certain notions that my Romance-saturated mind had until then taken for granted. Had I learned Greek first, I might be saying similar things about Latin. I am also studying German, which has no imperfect tense and uses the indicative mood in some situations where Romance wouldn’t dream of using anything but the subjunctive.
I personally tend to study use languages with a mindset geared towards creative use rather than merely decoding ancient texts, so that’s probably why the challenges of reading Greek vs. Latin don’t influence my overall opinion as heavily as they do for others.
I would say that English is mostly analytical, but has vestiges of cases. Let’s not force-fit a language into a category that it doesn’t completely fit into, just for the sake of categorical purity.