That'll be throw then, language language my dear fellow.
Whoops - fingers going faster than brain today. God knows where 'through' came from, doesn't even sound like 'throw' [or 'werfen' if we're in German mode... :-) ]
so Poles should abandon Polish and learn German instead
NO !! I love polish even though it's really difficult - people should enjoy the challenge. I don't like the sound of german - reminds me of old war movies. Keep poles speaking polish and I'll be happy :-)
I'd say that's more or less the equivalent of CPE in English. It's one step lower than "native fluency", which in case of Polish, I consider to be impossible to achieve for a non-native speaker. Of course I might be wrong but, so far, I've never met any foreigner speaking Polish with native fluency (and at least 2 with good basic fluency :-)).
Edit - just checked and according to wikipedia 'whom' is used as the objective form which could be either accusative or dative: en.wiktionary.org/wiki/whom so in fact you are right.
is it not correct to say - whom did you see on the ball/game?
It depends on how you define 'correct'. According to many prescriptive grammarians
"Whom did you see at the ballgame?" is technically speaking correct.
But no native speaker actually says that. It sounds bizarre, maybe a little like pronouncing a heavy nasal vowel for every single -ę in Polish. Also technically correct but no one talks that way.
Probably 99.99 per cent of native speakers would say 'who' in that sentence.
'whom' is sometimes (not always) used directly after prepositions (especially when the who is a relative clause marker but if the who and preposition are separated most people will say 'who'.
Those are the people for whom I wrote the book.
vs
Those are the people who I wrote the book for.
who in the first sentence would sound wrong and whom in the second would sound wrong.
mafketis - veering off the thread a little - I know both your English and your Polish are red-hot. If I remember from some of your other posts you are a linguist by profession. What other languages do you speak and which one(s) are your native tongue(s)? Hope you don't mind me asking - just wondering...
First, as a rule linguists _hate_ the question 'how many languages do you speak?' Linguistics is about studying languages as functioning systems (and some other stuff). (but I'm not mad, it's just a hard question to answer and alien to most of my concerns).
The number of languages I'm really capable in isn't necessarily so impressive. On the other hand, the number of languages whose grammars I thoroughly understand is very high. At one time I could parse Japanese sentences with the best of them but I can't speak, understand (much less read) Japanese.
On the other hand, I think the term 'monoglot linguist' is an oxymoron and I don't respect anyone who calls themself a linguist and who only speaks one language but linguistics isn't primarily about learning languages.
Anyway, I like to rank languages by ability
NAmerican English : 1 Polish : 2 Spanish (at various times Iberian and Mexican) : 3 Esperanto : 4 German : 4 Hungarian : 6
Can read a fair amount but not speak or understand:
Norwegian Portuguese Italian Swedish French
Roughly at an equal level with thorough knowledge of grammar without much practical ability:
I still rest my case for Navajo, whilst we seem to be ranking language difficulty, the nightmare of English spelling rules (or the lack thereof), and the hurdles of Polish, German, the Baltic tongues or Sanskrit etc.... notwithstanding--:)))
Yes, from the point of view of any European language it might as well be from another universe. I'm a linguist (who has a pretty good understanding of lots of non-western languages) and I can't make sense of the best Navajo grammars written (not for lack of trying).
For me the most difficult languages in Europe are german and russian.German because there is only one specific word for every thing and if you use another word it does not make senseso you have to learn all specific words by heart.
Contrary to that the word run in english has over 20 different meanings so you can use it to describe a lot of different actions.The other reason german is hard is the complicated syntax.(it is replica from the classical greek language syntax).
Russian is very difficult due to cyrillic alphabet which makes memorization of the words difficult and due to the heavy use of infinitive forms.
Somebody mentioned Esperanto, but didn't put it at the top of easiness to learn. It is far simpler than English because the spelling system is entirely straightforward. In the language, there are 16 rules to learn and no irregularities. For someone who speaks English or one of the Romance languages, it is so easy it is actually almost boring. For speakers of other Latin-influenced languages, it is also quite simple.
It was invented by a man in Białystok whose day-to-day life called for him to speak Polish, Russian and Yiddish, and as a doctor he needed an understanding of Latin, and it was also in the latter days of dominance of the French language and the rise of English. I suppose he just needed one more language to complete the set and no-one had published any Navaho, Nahuatl or Fang grammars that were readily available.
My father took an interest in Esperanto, and when I was about 10 years old, we went to the annual international Esperanto conference which was in Brighton that year. I spent most of my time at the ice rink, on the beach or strolling around the interesting streets there, but it was interesting to see people of almost every nationality, speaking to eachother in a language which was nobody's first langauge, a language with no government or army or other possible serious negative connotations.
Of course, Esperanto speakers are just a bunch of rope-sandal wearing vegetarian dreamers. Are those things negative connotiations? A more serious problem Esperanto has is the myth that it means to supplant national languages or mother tongues. It's original concept is good, but these days people seem to communicate the world over with "lol", "lmao", "fail" and "brb".
Which pointless grammatical gender is that? unless you're raving about the fact that polish has an odd three way masculine form thingy.. I have no idea what you are talking about.
Slovenian has however dropt the vocative case.. or rather.. it is exactly the same as the nominative.
I think the goat may have been saying there is no inherant need in language for there to be any grammatical gender. Not only is a table being masculine and a spoon being feminine nonsensical, but even with actual gender, it is not essential for there to be a difference with words and or grammar when talking about him or her.
Well there may not be any inherent need.. but then you can start putting together a new shiny artificial language that will actually stick and be efficient enough for all uses and trades. I actually quite enjoy these little things in languages that make you want to chew your arms off. It's what makes languages magical :P still, Slovenian hasn't dropt any genders as far as I know... and a table is most certainly feminine in Slovenian :P
osiol well I can't actually imagine dropping it in Polish; gender thing is simply overgrowing the language, running through it in every direction (isn't it called enmeshed?? :)). This is quite different to German where you could simply use more general Artikel (gosh forgotten the English name for a/the) - could perhaps be der instead of any other. and that's almost it.
I'm not saying any genders should be dropped and I'm not saying we should speak an artificial language. Just look at what is essential in communication and what isn't. Look out - Polish has lost of few of its old features - you're down to only three tenses and two numbers and allegedly the vocative is slipping away. Something else will be next.
I can't imagine gender disappearing in Polish either but based on the IE derived three gender system being whittled down to two in most European languages and in some cases only one, this kind of thing is possible.
osiol - no vocative is not slipping away - maybe it is more rarely used than in the centuries gone by but it is well alive (well I actually do not follow the language of those fresh generations too closely - but I know they make quite a lot of grammatical mistakes (it spreads TV-wise) and what is more they are not familiar with a whole of Polish words which look strange and exotic to them (this is simply limited vocabulary) well actually they speak slang don't they
osiol - no vocative is not slipping away - maybe it is more rarely used than in the centuries gone by
I argumentatively said what I said about the vocative because I hear kids using it. That tells me that it has plenty of life left in it. But when people use it wrongly, it is either a case of altering irregularities into regular forms or, as is less likely, vice versa. The old English word bōc (book) had a plural bōces (pronounced like the word bookies). As fōt and fōtes (footies) developed into foot and feet, bōces developed into beek, but for some odd linguistic reason, during the early Middle English period, it was corrected to the more logical plural of books, although feet never became foots. This could be an example of hypercorrection, although maybe not so hyper.
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