This week we engage the accusative case. We have encountered it before and blithely ignored its challenges, but now, well into the second semester, we cannot avoid the accusative, nor the bewildering and ineluctable intricacies of case generally—and number and gender and agreement and geez
So, let’s say you want to say, “The dog bites the man.” In Polish, pies is “dog” and mezczyzna is “man,” but both of these nouns are in the nominative case, so when we decline “man” to the accusative case to indicate that as the direct object he receives the action of the verb, we would write mezczyzne, or Pies gryzie mezczyzne. Because “dog” is so obviously in the nominative case and “man” so obviously in the accusative case, word order doesn’t really matter. One could write Mezczyzne pies gryzie or Mezczyzne gryzie pies and convey the same essential action of dog biting man, though with slightly different emphases. In English, of course, our nouns don’t, as a rule, decline for case, which is usually signaled by position in a sentence and context. In the sentence, “The man bites the dog,” neither noun has changed its form, though the meaning has been reversed owing to the change of position. In Polish, this unusual occurrence would be rendered Mezczyzna gryzie psa, with “dog” being declined into the accusative case.
If that were all one had to attend to, the knowledge that a noun tricks itself out a little differently according to its function in the sentence, case would seem a little cumbersome but workable. When, however, one learns that these little trick-out endings number over a half dozen according to gender (three types of masculine: inanimate, animate, and male persons only; two types of feminine, depending on hard or soft stem endings; and two neuter, depending on stem endings) and another half dozen owing to number and the hardness and softness of stem endings, one can get a little ticked off. On my Accusative Case Endings Study Sheet, there are four columns (not counting sub-columns) and twelve rows (not counting sub-rows). Another unhelpful feature of the accusative case is that the adjectival endings are different from the noun endings. If a man bites the “new dog,” he’d bite nowego psa, not nowa psa. And if he were to bite the whole damn pack, he’d bite nowe psy. And I remind you that there are seven different cases in Polish. If they replicate the complexity of the accusative—and I’m beginning to suspect that they do—well, damn it! Damn it!
Last week I sent my first draft Polish essay to a friend in Poland for proofreading. A native speaker of Polish, and fluent in Swedish and English, she apologized for her native tongue—along with supplying numerous corrections—“There is no logic in Polish.” This is not what Professor Polakiewicz has assured us. He has assured us that Polish is precise and mathematical. You just apply the rules. At some deep linguistic level, no doubt, it is, but if that structure and logic is not readily apparent to a highly educated native speaker, I wonder how clearly it can be explained to a foreigner. There are rules, it would seem, and there are exceptions to the rules, which seem to have rules of their own, then there are genuinely ruleless exceptions you just have to memorize, and then there are idioms. True enough, it may all work like clockwork in the end, but have you ever seen the inner workings of a clock? Does one have to know how it works in order to tell the time?
On NPR this week, some reference was made to the French Education minister’s proposal that all French children study English from kindergarten. One socio-linguist—as socio-linguists are wont—deplored the proposal owing to its implied power consequences: English was being politically privileged over other foreign languages and even, subtly, French. (He deplored this proposal for his American audience in English.) The counter position, interestingly, was “not to worry,” that in the future, translation software would be so sophisticated that no one would have to learn any second languages at all. In the forehearable future, we will all speak into some device in our native tongue, where it would be translated and voiced in the auditor’s native language, who can respond in her native language for it to be translated back into ours. Problem solved, technologically, as most great political questions are solved, when they’re not solved by violence. I won’t hold my breath, and in the meantime, will study my grammar, because as my Polish friend warned, “The grammar is relentless.”
