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:
>
> CJ:
> > It lost the morphological distinctions;
> 
> Carol responds:
> Right.
> 
> CJ:
> > and yet grammarians continued to distinguish accusative and dative
> cases long after the morphological distinctives had disappeared (the
> subsumption of the two into a single "objective case" is a 20th
> century phenomenon still not universally followed). I think there are
> two possible explanations. Either they were simply hadn't gotten
> around to jettisoning older terminology, or they genuinely still found
> the cases useful, any lack of morphological distinction notwithstanding.
> 
> Carol responds:
> In the case of nominative for subjective, I think you're correct. My
> ancient copy of "The Plain English Handbook" (copyright 1966!) give
> the pronoun cases as nominative, objective, and possessive. I was
> never, as a student of English in high school, college, or graduate
> school, exposed to the terms genitive, dative, or accusative in
> relation to English (except for Anglo-Saxon). They were, however, used
> (along with ablative) for Latin.

Geoff:
But if they are studying German, they have to be familiarised with four 
cases (admittedly two less than Latin) and their usage.

This throws up a subsidiary problem which I met when teaching the 
beginners year in German when I had some slack in my timetable. 
Because language teaching in the UK has become creative writing 
intensive and far too tolerant in accepting poor grammar, I found 
myself in the situation of having to instruct pupils about matters 
such as subject, object and concepts such as adjectives and 
prepositions, theoretically not part of the lesson subject.