Musings on grammar, notably Czech grammar

[lproven]

Quick. Without thinking. What's the difference between "why is it not working?" and "why it is not working"?

One's a question. One is a statement. But why? What's the difference?

English is a bastard. I.e. a mongrel. It's a mixture.

But its primary parents are 2 Teutonic languages -- old Norse and old German -- and a Romance language: Middle French.

All are Western Indoeuropean.

They form questions in similar ways.

Statement: You play chess. Pronoun (object) / verb / noun (subject).

To turn this into a question, invert object and verb: Play you chess?

English still does this, but it's complex, because we introduced auxiliary verbs.

We don't say "play you chess?" any more.

Real example: colleagues of my Norwegian ex, on Hemingway's bar in Nedre Slottsgatan in Oslo, asked me how to say in Norwegian, "do you play chess?" They wanted a word-for-word transliteration.

Note, these are 2 English guys who've been there for some years at that point. Asking me, the newbie in town, trying to study Norwegian to speak to kjersti.

I had to say: you can't. Norwegian doesn't use auxiliary verbs like that. Translate "do / you / play / chess" literally into Norwegian, it becomes meaningless word soup.

You have to use the older, simpler, Teutonic pattern. Swap pronound and verb. "Play you chess?" "Spille du sjakk?"

We English natives get confused 'cos we are so used to using "to do" as an auxiliary. You can't just invert the question any more. We do something much more complicated. We split off the subject verb phrase:

[You] [play chess]

Now, set the verb phrase fragment aside. Make a question from just the pronoun by inserting a whole new verb:

"Do you?"

Now affix the verb phrase on the end:

"Do you" + "play chess". Now it's a question.

But you can use a helper verb outside of question form:

You play chess. ← statement
Do you play chess? ← question
You do play chess. ← emphatic.

Czech, for instance, doesn't do this.

Hraješ šachy. ← statement: you play chess. Note, no pronoun; the conjugation of the bare verb "hrát" means "you play".
Hraješ šachy? ← question. No change in word order. Tone of voice is all that indicates a question. (This is fucking hard.)
Ty hraješ šachy. ← emphatic. The pronoun is back. You play chess.

Because we're so used to the auxiliary-verb thing in English, it obscures and blurs the basic structure. Other languages make it much simpler.

Japanese and Chinese are way easier (at my super-elementary level, anyway.) In Japanese, take a sentence, put the particle "ka" on the end, and it's a question. In Chinese, put "ma" on the end.

Nǐ xià xiàngqí. You play chess. Statement.
Nǐ xià xiàngqí ma? Do you play chess? (In the rest of Europe, "play you chess?") Do you play chess?

My example at the top is the older, simpler form, but in direct questions, we don't use that, so we've forgotten how it works.

It is broken. ← statement
Is it broken? ← question, simple inversion, no auxiliary verb: "does it work?"

Why, it is broken! ← exclamation, emphatic indicating surprise. Still a statement because in statement word order.
Why is it broken? ← question, but not "does it work", instead "it does not work, what is the reason?"

Teaching English has taught me a ton about English and occasionally helps with learning others, currently notably Czech, which is an evil motherfscker of a language. Sorry, but it is. Nobody needs this much grammar. Except for Finns, but it gives them something to be miserable about and thus an excuse to drink. Kippis!

• 4 genders: feminine (hra, game), neuter (sklo, glass), masculine animate (strom, tree), masculine inanimate (les, forest).


• 2 plurals: one for 2-4, a different one above 5. 1 beer, jedno pivo. 2 beers, dve pivna. 5 beers, pět piv.


• 7 cases. Indescribable in English. Know the difference between "he" and "him"? That's nominative versus accusative case. "He called John." "John called him." "He" is the object of the sentence, the thing doing the verb. "Him" is the subject of the sentence, the thing having something done to it by the verb.

Czech has 7. All are different for all 4 genders, naturally. The high plural is formed from the genitive case, that of ownership. "John's book" is a sort of bodged-together genitive case.

As someone said wonderfully on FB: "Czech goes... 'One dog. Two dogs. Three dogs. Four dogs. Five LOTS OF DOGS! Six LOTS OF DOGS!'"

Czech has nominative, accusative, dative, genitive (same as German so far), vocative (same as Latin so far), locative, instrumental. There might be ablative in there somewhere as well. I think. Or is that only Latin? I don't know.

Thing doing (subject), thing done to (object), thing given, thing possessed, thing being named, position of thing, thing something being done with. Ablative is Latin only -- I had to look it up -- for things in motion. Instead of that, Czech has 2 different future tenses -- for normal verbs and verbs of motion. Except for flying, because they hadn't invented flying yet when they made up the rules, so it doesn't take the future-tense-of-motion. But to make up for it, there are also special tenses for things done habitually ("I used to go to the gym", "John goes to the cinema every week".)

I am not doing very well in Czech.

My Czech friends tell me that I'm over-thinking it and just need to go with it, let it flow. This makes me want to punch them. Sometimes I want to retort that if learning another language as an adult was that bloody easy, they'd know when to use "a" or "the" or neither without thinking about it, but that's just mean and cruel and I try not to.

I thought about tagging this #projectBrno but I'm not in Brno any more. I moved to Prague a couple of months ago. I probably should start the more alliterative #projectPrague but it's a bit late.