JK Rowling pens a Harry Potter prequel / War of Roses/Holmes?Figg/Walpurga

[Geoff Bannister]

--- In HPFGU-OTChatter at yahoogroups.com, "Carol" <justcarol67 at ...> wrote:
>
> Carol earlier:
> > > In the name of the grammar police, I hope you'll forgive me for
> pointing out that it's "didst thou" ("thee" is objective case; "thou"
> is nominative case).
> > 
> > Geoff:
> > I hope you'll forgive me for pointing out that surely "thee" - which
> I agree is referring to an object - is however actually the accusative
> case.
> >
> Carol responds:
> Possibly you're thinking of Latin. English doesn't have an accusative
> case; the English cases are subjective (corresponds to nominative),
> objective (corresponds to accusative), and possessive (corresponds to
> genitive). And, of course, we use prepositions to indicate the
> relationships expressed through the dative and ablative cases in
> Latin, so those cases have no English equivalent.

Geoff:
I'm thinking of Latin, German and Russian which have 6,4 and 
7 cases respectively. I would agree with you that there is often 
confusion in the use of "thou" and its various case derivatives.

I don't recall ever using case names in English. In addition to 
using prepositions as you rightly point out, we do retain some 
elements of the old case structure, mainly in personal pronouns.
We /do/ have an equivalent of dative in English; in the phrase "give 
him the book", "him" is a dative without a preposition.

When I was at school, we studied English grammar in great depth and 
had to do clause analysis which very often required us to describe the 
function of almost every word in a sentence. It's a very thorough 
discipline and gave me a great insight into the format of my own
 language. That, coupled with Latin and reading Julius Caesar in the 
original Latin (De Bello Gallico) gave me a love of language and 
linguistics which have remained a great interest ever since. Just as an 
aside, I am fascinated by the links between the Celtic languages in 
the UK, especially Welsh, (Scots) Gaelic and Cornish.

I too taught English at one point in my career, mainly to adults in 
night school. But, as the 1928 Hadow Report worded it, "Every 
teacher is a teacher of English".