Rainer Langenhan of Handakte WebLAWg pointed out this weblog, Sprachblog – Tipps zu deutscher Rechtschreibung und Grammatik. It is part of the site of Ines Balcik, co-author of a book on the subject, Pons Deutsche Grammatik und Rechtschreibung. The book appears to be partly directed at schoolchildren and written with a minimum of jargon and everyday examples. The author is a ‘Diplom-Fachsprachenexpertin’.
The weblog is very new and intended for non-linguists but to people who need to use language at work but have no time for thick books and don’t understand jargon terms. I gather from the comments on January 6th that it’s also not intended for all webloggers – and probably not for me.
Incidentally, I wish Germans wouldn’t always call the accusative the fourth case. It makes life very hard for those of us who learnt it as the second case. Obviously, they have no choice, since in German that’s correct, but I will continue to complain.
I know why I think it is the 4th case: during 9 years of Latin it was drilled into me that in the line-up of cases the accusative takes place 4. They taught me French the same way. But in both cases, the teachers were German. My daughter went to school in the U.S. and has no such concept. She memorizes her German forms in a sequence I find very strange (the genitive comes last). But I am curious: How did these different systems evolve?
Yes, of course, that’s what I meant: I wish they wouldn’t put it last. It irritated me when I was doing Russian classes here in 1967, and it irritates me with Turkish now, although our book is so useless that it scarcely has any such tables.
You had accusative and dative in French?!
What I learnt at school, in England, was nominative, accusative, genitive, dative. In Latin, I think vocative followed nominative and ablative was at the end.
In Turkish, it’s only the order of accusative and genitive that are different.
Why? Perhaps a linguistics blogger will read this and help us.
In Italy we learnt Latin cases in the following order:
1) nominativo
2) genitivo
3) dativo
4) accusativo
5) vocativo
6) ablativo
When I started learning Latin I had already been studying German for 3 years, so I didn’t find anything special in it.
I find 1st, 2nd case etc also irritating, just because I need those two secs to realize what they are, I’d prefer Nominativ and so on…
@FF: Yes, that’s irritating too.