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Re:In Defense of Latin by greydius on Tuesday November 19, 2019 @05:16PM (#21578895)
Can you explain how your first two examples mean the same thing?
Re:In Defense of Latin by smcl on Tuesday November 19, 2019 @05:42PM (#21579128)
Shameless plug, I wrote about this here: https://blog.mclemon.io/cases-are-hard-who-punched-who - I used a slightly more one-sided example (Petr punches Pavel) to start things off ... but I talked a bit more about other cases to explain how it all fits together and why they're important.

Basically though, in the specific example in the GP comment we know who loves whom by the order of words in the sentence - "${subject} loves ${object}" which is different from "${object} loves ${subject}". We know this because the word order in English tells us this.

But in Czech and Latin this isn't how it works - the word order doesn't have the same significance or meaning as it does in English [1]. You indicate who does what by making a little modification to the words. In this example it's one of the simpler cases - a simple verb with a subject and an object. The subject is the "nominative" case (like the dictionary/default form of a word) and the object should be in the "accusative" case. So it's actually something like "${object.nominative()} loves ${subject.accusative()}".

And just to confuse you further - it's not just "who does what" - there are other cases that denote doing something with or to or in :-) I give some examples in the above link

[1] = that's not to say word order doesn't have a role, it's just not the same role as in English

Re:In Defense of Latin by hackyhacky on Tuesday November 19, 2019 @06:25PM (#21579482)
Regarding the linked blog page: It's a nice introduction to the idea of cases, but it's not entirely accurate: the usual dative/locative form of Pavel is Pavlovi. Pavlu would be used only when there's a surname present. Thus "o Pavlovi" but "o Pavlu Novákovi".
Re:In Defense of Latin by smcl on Tuesday November 19, 2019 @06:31PM (#21579536)
Oops, thanks! Fixed - these nuances still kinda escape me :-O
Re:In Defense of Latin by zvrba on Wednesday November 20, 2019 @02:59AM (#21581964)
> ${object.nominative()} loves ${subject.accusative()}

You mixed it up, it should be "${object.accusative()} loves ${subject.nominative()}".

Or, I guess, how you define "object" and "subject" for "loves" :P But grammatically, for transitive verbs, "subject" is the doer of an action, "object" is the target of an action.

Re:In Defense of Latin by smcl on Wednesday November 20, 2019 @04:04AM (#21582271)
Damn I rewrote that comment about 2 times and must have mangled it in the process!
Re:In Defense of Latin by schoen on Tuesday November 19, 2019 @05:18PM (#21578914)
I assume "Janu" is the accusative form of "Jana", indicating that Jana is the recipient rather than the source of the love in each sentence.
Re:In Defense of Latin by btilly on Tuesday November 19, 2019 @05:44PM (#21579142)
That assumption is correct. You see the same conjugation form in other Slavic languages, including Russian.
Re:In Defense of Latin by zvrba on Wednesday November 20, 2019 @03:02AM (#21581984)
Nouns/names/numbers have declensions. Verbs have conjugations.
Re:In Defense of Latin by schoen on Thursday November 21, 2019 @01:31AM (#21591900)
I think the coverall term that btilly wanted was "inflections".