Nouns: Case, Number, Gender

Case is the marking of the role a word fulfills in an utterance. Verbs, and occasionally modifiers set cases.

I go to Chicago

I came from Chicago

I set the book on the table

I gave the Doritos to Jacqueline

The dog ran around the room

Many languages mark case with inflectional affixes. Others only by position and by placement near identifying words. With the exception of pronouns and the apostrophe 's, English uses position and function words to mark case. 

Here's a fine example of how case works in many languages from Mark Twain's linguistics lesson, "The Awful German Language":

Every time I think I have got one of these four confusing "cases" where I am master of it, a seemingly insignificant preposition intrudes itself into my sentence, clothed with an awful and unsuspected power, and crumbles the ground from under me. For instance, my book inquires after a certain bird — (it is always inquiring after things which are of no sort of consequence to anybody): "Where is the bird?" Now the answer to this question — according to the book — is that the bird is waiting in the blacksmith shop on account of the rain. Of course no bird would do that, but then you must stick to the book. Very well, I begin to cipher out the German for that answer. I begin at the wrong end, necessarily, for that is the German idea. I say to myself, "Regen (rain) is masculine — or maybe it is feminine — or possibly neuter — it is too much trouble to look now. Therefore, it is either der(the) Regen, or die (the) Regen, or das (the) Regen, according to which gender it may turn out to be when I look. In the interest of science, I will cipher it out on the hypothesis that it is masculine. Very well — then the rain is der Regen, if it is simply in the quiescent state of being mentioned, without enlargement or discussion — Nominative case; but if this rain is lying around, in a kind of a general way on the ground, it is then definitely located, it is doing something — that is, resting (which is one of the German grammar's ideas of doing something), and this throws the rain into the Dative case, and makes it dem Regen. However, this rain is not resting, but is doing something actively, — it is falling — to interfere with the bird, likely — and this indicates movement, which has the effect of sliding it into the Accusative case and changing dem Regen into den Regen." Having completed the grammatical horoscope of this matter, I answer up confidently and state in German that the bird is staying in the blacksmith shop "wegen (on account of) den Regen." Then the teacher lets me softly down with the remark that whenever the word "wegen" drops into a sentence, it always throws that subject into the Genitive case, regardless of consequences — and that therefore this bird stayed in the blacksmith shop "wegen des Regens."

N. B. — I was informed, later, by a higher authority, that there was an "exception" which permits one to say "wegen den Regen" in certain peculiar and complex circumstances, but that this exception is not extended to anything but rain.

While we may, along with Twain, celebrate our lack of case markers—except of course, with personal pronouns, we might want to think about how English marks the genitive case (it's commonly called possessive). Look at the parenthetical phrase translating wegen. 

QUESTIONS OR COMMENTS 

Our use of morphological case is limited to personal pronouns

Nominative Object   Genitive

sg I me   my (mine)

pl   we     us     our

sg             ? ? ?

pl              you you   your

sg   he/she/it     him/her/it     his/hers/its

pl   they     them     their

Some oddities even in this limited case-marking system. 

What's the object ending? 

What's the possessive form? 

What happened to the singular second person pronoun? 

This line from Chaucer's Canterbury Tales gives us a hint:

That hem hath holpen whan that they were seke

Another strange feature of what a German Twain would call The Awful English Language: 

What's the rule for forming the reflexive version of Englilsh pronoun?

Think about the cases we learned about in Latin, German, or French class.

How do we mark object cases (there are more than three in many languages)?

Accusative?

Locative (several different cases in many languages, including ours)?

Ablative?

Verbs and adjectives can push nouns into cases. Here's an example:

I am bored by this book

I am bored with this book

I am happy about this outcome

Is it worth it to define different cases for these three examples? Probably not for our purposes, but a student of language—a linguist—would insist on it. What about this recently more common example:

I am bored of this discussion, and I wish we'd move on.

I find myself uncomfortable with the case-assignment here, but I keep finding it in all sorts of sources. It's an example of how the genitive or possessive case seems to operate like that drawer in our kitchen that we toss things into when we're in a hurry. 

QUESTIONS OR COMMENTS 

Gender, aside from the current movement away from gender in third person pronouns, is something we don't worry much about in English. The change, like the erasure of thee, thou, thy, is culturally driven, here by the fact that gender, originally meaning kind or variety (one of our  gen- words from the first class) now means sexual identity. In many languages gender, a handy clarification of what modifies what, has nothing to do with sex—"in a tree," "long and thin," and so on are examples. Here's another linguistic lesson friom Mark Twain that shows us that the relation between gender and sex is far from one-to-one even in gender-heavy German:

Every noun has a gender, and there is no sense or system in the distribution; so the gender of each must be learned separately and by heart. There is no other way. To do this one has to have a memory like a memorandum-book. In German, a young lady has no sex, while a turnip has. Think what overwrought reverence that shows for the turnip, and what callous disrespect for the girl. See how it looks in print — I translate this from a conversation in one of the best of the German Sunday-school books:

"Gretchen.

Wilhelm, where is the turnip?

Wilhelm.

She has gone to the kitchen.

Gretchen.

Where is the accomplished and beautiful English maiden?

Wilhelm.

It has gone to the opera."

To continue with the German genders: a tree is male, its buds are female, its leaves are neuter; horses are sexless, dogs are male, cats are female — tomcats included, of course; a person's mouth, neck, bosom, elbows, fingers, nails, feet, and body are of the male sex, and his head is male or neuter according to the word selected to signify it, and not according to the sex of the individual who wears it — for in Germany all the women either male heads or sexless ones; a person's nose, lips, shoulders, breast, hands, and toes are of the female sex; and his hair, ears, eyes, chin, legs, knees, heart, and conscience haven't any sex at all. The inventor of the language probably got what he knew about a conscience from hearsay.

Now, by the above dissection, the reader will see that in Germany a man may think he is a man, but when he comes to look into the matter closely, he is bound to have his doubts; he finds that in sober truth he is a most ridiculous mixture; and if he ends by trying to comfort himself with the thought that he can at least depend on a third of this mess as being manly and masculine, the humiliating second thought will quickly remind him that in this respect he is no better off than any woman or cow in the land.

In the German it is true that by some oversight of the inventor of the language, a Woman is a female; but a Wife (Weib) is not — which is unfortunate. A Wife, here, has no sex; she is neuter; so, according to the grammar, a fish is he, his scales are she, but a fishwife is neither. To describe a wife as sexless may be called under-description; that is bad enough, but over-description is surely worse. A German speaks of an Englishman as the Engländer; to change the sex, he adds inn, and that stands for Englishwoman — Engländerinn. That seems descriptive enough, but still it is not exact enough for a German; so he precedes the word with that article which indicates that the creature to follow is feminine, and writes it down thus: "die Engländerinn," — which means "theshe-Englishwoman." I consider that that person is over-described.

Well, after the student has learned the sex of a great number of nouns, he is still in a difficulty, because he finds it impossible to persuade his tongue to refer to things as "he" and "she," and "him" and "her," which it has been always accustomed to refer to it as "it." When he even frames a German sentence in his mind, with the hims and hers in the right places, and then works up his courage to the utterance-point, it is no use — the moment he begins to speak his tongue flies the track and all those labored males and females come out as "its." And even when he is reading German to himself, he always calls those things "it," where as he ought to read in this way:

The Tale of the Fishwife and Its Sad Fate

I capitalize the nouns, in the German (and ancient English) fashion.

It is a bleak Day. Hear the Rain, how he pours, and the Hail, how he rattles; and see the Snow, how he drifts along, and of the Mud, how deep he is! Ah the poor Fishwife, it is stuck fast in the Mire; it has dropped its Basket of Fishes; and its Hands have been cut by the Scales as it seized some of the falling Creatures; and one Scale has even got into its Eye, and it cannot get her out. It opens its Mouth to cry for Help; but if any Sound comes out of him, alas he is drowned by the raging of the Storm. And now a Tomcat has got one of the Fishes and she will surely escape with him. No, she bites off a Fin, she holds her in her Mouth — will she swallow her? No, the Fishwife's brave Mother-dog deserts his Puppies and rescues the Fin — which he eats, himself, as his Reward. O, horror, the Lightning has struck the Fish-basket; he sets him on Fire; see the Flame, how she licks the doomed Utensil with her red and angry Tongue; now she attacks the helpless Fishwife's Foot — she burns him up, all but the big Toe, and even she is partly consumed; and still she spreads, still she waves her fiery Tongues; she attacks the Fishwife's Leg and destroys it; she attacks its Hand and destroys her also; she attacks the Fishwife's Leg and destroys her also; she attacks its Body and consumes him; she wreathes herself about its Heart and it is consumed; next about its Breast, and in a Moment she is a Cinder; now she reaches its Neck — he goes; now its Chin — it goes; now its Nose — she goes. In another Moment, except Help come, the Fishwife will be no more. Time presses — is there none to succor and save? Yes! Joy, joy, with flying Feet the she-Englishwoman comes! But alas, the generous she-Female is too late: where now is the fated Fishwife? It has ceased from its Sufferings, it has gone to a better Land; all that is left of it for its loved Ones to lament over, is this poor smoldering Ash-heap. Ah, woeful, woeful Ash-heap! Let us take him up tenderly, reverently, upon the lowly Shovel, and bear him to his long Rest, with the Prayer that when he rises again it will be a Realm where he will have one good square responsible Sex, and have it all to himself, instead of having a mangy lot of assorted Sexes scattered all over him in Spots.

QUESTIONS OR COMMENTS 

Number is, like past tense in English, largely but not wholly regular. We still have several plurals that follow several of the common Gemanic patterns. 

man/men

child/children

kin/kindred

moose/moose

Man/men and woman/women really aren't Germanic plurality patterns. They are forms that developed because of the ease-of-pronunciation issues that we will think about more completely later, but here's a preview with phonetic changes shown without the International Phonetic Alphabet, the other IPA.

Stage        Form                      Process

1                [mahni]-->            Plural ending fronts and raises the first vowel to sound in bet

2 -3            [mehni]-->              Plural ending loses stress, becomes "schwa" and disappears

4                [mehn]

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1                [wifman]-->             [f/m] cluster reduced to [m]

2 -3          [wiman]-->              [i] backed by [a} to "u" in put; [man] loses stress,       

4                [wumuhn]

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1                [wifmani]-->            [f/m] cluster reduced to [m]

2                [wimani]-->             as above, plural ending fronts and raises to sound in be

3-4            [wimehni]-->          as above, ending loses stress, becomes "schwa" and disappears

5                [wimehn]-->             plural "mehn" blocks backing process, instead lowers [i] to sound in bit

6                [wImehn]   the second syllable is weakened

So the plural of man changes its vowel while woman changes the first syllable to mark plural.