Objects at rest? (aka, some more rabbitting on about Estonian Grammar)

Okay, so I've finally decided to start my little cross-comparisons project. I've been thinking for some time that I need to go through everything I know (or, at least, am familiar with) in German and Estonian and make sure I can do it in both languages.

I'm hoping this will also help with revision, and I might finally be able to remember things like ordinal numbers. Have I looked at them several times? Yes. Can I remember them when I want to? Not so much.

I started the other day with creating tables for First Person Singular Personal Pronouns - lining up the case with the word. It was a small table for German, slightly longer (as in, ten more entries) for Estonian.

Then I tried "matching" the words in both sets. To do this, I had to once again go back and try to wrap my head around the way Estonian deals with direct and indirect objects.

I have often struggled with this, I have read it several times, but never quite gotten to grips with it. I think this is partly because every Estonian textbook (and teacher) I have consulted tends to withhold the Partitive case for an interminable amount of time.

I don't know why they do it. Straight up, you get introduced to Nominative and Genative, but then they take you on a journey through all the locative cases and the Abessive and Comitative before talking about the Partitive.

Yet the Partative case is reasonably important for answering the "whom?" question in a sentence. You can't really talk about the object of a sentence without it, so withholding it is terribly frustrating for someone who comes from a Subject-Verb-Object language background.

I can deal with the S-V-O pattern being changed around, but not being incomplete. "Okay, this is how to recognise the subject, and this is what to do with the verb, and, you know what? Let's just leave the object out of it for a little while whilst we talk about everything else".

Plus, it's a bit hard trying to fully appreciate the fact that the Allative case is used for indirect objects when no one has properly addressed what to do with direct objects yet.

Okay, yes, the Partitive case is a bit weird and challenging when you don't have an equivalent in your language, and the locative cases are much easier to understand, so you can get them over with quickly, but still...

So, anyway, the upshot of my little table game is that I'm starting to finally get a grip on objects in the Estonian sentence. So, here's a little summary of my scribblings:

Sentence Part	English	German	Estonian
Subject	I (Nominative)	Ich (Nominative)	Mina/ma (Nominative)
Object	Me (Accusative)	Mich (Accusative)	Mind (Partative)* OR Mina/ma (Nominative)**
Indirect Object	Me (Dative)	Mir (Dative)	Mulle (Allative)***

*If the action isn't completed, involves only part of something or is negative, then you use the Partative (mind, in this example). This seems to be more common than the alternative.

**You only use the Nominative (Mina or ma, in this example) if the action is positive and complete and involves the whole of the thing in question.

***The Allative case is used for indirect objects as well as a locative case, so mulle is the equivalent of "me" in the sentences "he passed it to me", "he did it for me" and "he landed on me".

So, "me" in English could be "mind", "mina" or "mulle" in Estonian, depending on the context of the sentence.

Why it took the better part of three years for me to finally stitch that together in a coherent manner is beyond me.

(Mind you, I can't remember ever seeing it as "mina", so I'm not sure if the thing about Nominative case applies to pronouns exactly...)