Looney Labs Rabbits Mailing list Archive

Re: [Rabbits] Adding More Characters to AYAW??

  • From"Timothy Hunt" <games@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
  • DateTue, 18 Sep 2007 14:01:29 -0500
> It's called 'grammatical case', and in German it involves different
> words used as pronouns.  I don't remember specifically which case would
> have been used in the parallel German construction, nor which specific
> word, but if I recall correctly, the German for 'they' in that
> construction would have been one of 'sie', 'ihr', 'ihn', or 'ihnen'. The
> four cases are called 'nominative', 'accusative', 'genitive', and
> 'dative'; nominative is a rough match to the 'subject' of the sentence;
> 'accusative' is a rough match to the direct object of the sentence;
> 'genitive' is, if I recall correctly, an associational case, similar to
> but not restricted to possessive, and I have no recollection of the
> usage of the dative case.

Dative is typically indirect object.

So...

John [nominative] took Tracy's [genetive] ball [accusative] from the
closet [dative].  Then he [nominative] put it [accusative] back in it
[dative].

Timothy