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...)

Accusative and Dative

Meanwhile, there's something that has been bothering me for some time:

Why doesn't Estonian have Accusative and Dative cases? It has more cases than any language really needs, but not an Accusative or Dative case?

Russian has Accusative and Dative cases. German has Accusative and Dative cases. Finish has an Accusative case and a Partative case for the direct object (I'm not sure what it does for it's indirect objects)...

Since all of the major language that would influence Estonian have at least an Accusative case, why doesn't Estonian?

Surely, like Finish, it must have had an Accusative/Partitive thing happening for direct objects. What happened to the Accusative? Why did it decide that the object of a sentence could be in anyone of the three base cases? How did the Genitive case get to be the main go-to case for total objects?

Coming from a language that relies heavily on the subject-verb-object relationship, it seems odd to me. Like someone created a person without any feet, and then tried to come up with a variety of foot-substitutes. Functional? Well, yes. Practical? Not so much.

Then again, a lot of Estonian seems like that.

May I 'thou' you?

I thought that was a peculiar structure when I encountered it in Estonian, but then I stumbled across it in German and in English (albeit, not Modern English).

Seems to be the way to ask someone if you can be familiar with them - not, "may I call you thou?" but rather "may I 'thou' you"?

It took a while for the purpose of "thou" to sink into my head. In university I don't think we expressly covered the fact that "thou" was singular and "you" was plural. That "you" was the polite form, yes, but not that it was the plural form.

When I started working on Estonian I was giving myself notes in Old English, pulled from the dark recesses of my mind, to help me keep track of things. I had remembered that "eow" was plural, so I jotted it next to "teie/te" in my notes to help me remember that the "you" starting with 't' was plural in this language (I was struggling to separate it from "tu" in French).

I had really only seen the Old English versions laid out in this table from Mitchell and Robinson (1992):

Nom.	þū 'thou'	ġit 'you two'	ġē 'ye, you'
Acc.	þē, þeċ	inc	ēow
Gen.	þīn	incer	ēower
Dat.	þē	inc	ēow

While I inderstood the principles behind the Old English parts of that table, I hadn't quite cottoned onto the fact that "thou" was also in that singular column to help make sense of the "þū". I think I was just distracted by the fact that we used to have a Dual form (as well as a Singular and a Plural) for first and second person.

And, of course, because it was never expressly said in class, and I wasn't paying attention when it was written down, I missed it.

So, here I was using "eow" incorrectly (always in the Accusative/Dative case forms, when Estonian doesn't even have Accusitive or Dative cases), when I could have just been using "thou" (in its various declensions) for "sina/sa".

Like a lot of things in this whole language learning schtick, it suddenly became clear after I started learning German, and noticed that the verb conjugation for "du" was pretty dang close to the conjugation for "thou" - which lead to quite the "well, duh, why didn't I notice that before?" moment, I can tell you.

The odd thing is, I know how to conjugate verbs with a thou form, but hadn't actually noticed it was different from the you form. So many gaps in my knowledge. It's as annoying as heck.

I swear, learning another language would be so much easier if we were just taught English properly at school. Dang post-80s curriculum is too lazy. Keeps trying to keep the kids happy by only teaching the version of English we use currently - and even then it barely teaches the grammar.

I tell you, when I write my "introduction to Estonian" textbook, I'm totally going to use a full English/German comparison model that starts by reintroducing the concepts of second-person singular and cases in English. Everything makes a lot more sense in another language if you can see it working in your own, first.

Language Learning Can Be Fun

And sometimes it just hurts my head.

Especially Estonian. There are days when I think I finally understand something with this crazy-stupid language, only to realise that the logical connections I have made were running on the wrong logic, and I actually don't have a clue.

Take imperatives, which I've been working on lately with my tutor. I read the rules in a grammar book, and think "Okay, I've got that. It's unnecessarily complicated, but I've got it". Then I find out they don't apply to irregular verbs - but only certain irregular verbs.

I'm looking at two irregular verbs and trying to work out what the difference is between them - why one would use the stem of the present tense and the other would use the stem of the -ma infinitive - and I can't quite convey to my tutor what it is I'm having trouble with. To her it all seems perfectly logical.

--The second one is an irregular verb - that's why.
--But aren't they both irregular verbs?
--Yes, but the second one is a complete spelling change, while the other is an internal change.
--In the first word the present tense form only has one letter in common with it's infinitive - and the second word also has letters in common with the infinitive...
--Yes, but the second one is an irregular verb.
--But so is the first word. Is it because the first letter is the same for both the present tense stem and the infinitive in the first word?
--It's just because the second word is "go", we'll move on now.

I've been trying to talk myself out of the mindset that Estonian is wrong. I often look at the rules and say to myself (and anyone within earshot) "That's just daft. Why would anyone do that?" But I have to remind myself that the language just works on a different logic to English, and I'll have a better chance of 'getting' it if I stop resisting it.

But I went home after my Estonian lesson the other night and listened to a couple of Italianpod podcasts last night, just to stop my head from hurting. I find the newbie Italian lessons relaxing and simple, and somehow refreshing after trying to wrap my mind around Estonian grammar.

Not that I'm learning Italian. I am so not learning Italian. German and Estonian are enough for this year. Seriously.

Mudila - or - Yin, Yang and Laulud

So, I found this site yesterday that is...

Well, it's...

That's to say it's...

Well, it just is.

Have you ever encountered something that was so awful you want to tell everyone how bad it is, yet so useful that you also want to recommend it to people?

I'm not talking about one of those "so bad it's good" kind of things, where the awfulness is actually the charm, but rather something that is equally bad and good.

This site is the source of my bipolarisation:

http://mudila.lastekas.ee/

It's a site designed to help Estonian kids improve their language skills. It has songs, games and activities as well as sections where you can work on learning vocabulary. It's clearly designed for children between the ages of three and six, and has the option of using subtitles in Estonian or Russian, so I'd say it's probably intended for Estonian preschoolers.

It's terrible. Really and truly terrible. The songs are awful, the animation is terrible, the games are designed in such a way that you can't repeat the question (or the answer, if you missed it), the animation is terrible, the music is inane, there are no explanations for anything and the animation is terrible.

Did I mention that the animation is terrible?

And yet...

And yet it's actually quite useful. The option to play "easy" games entirely within the Estonian vocabulary (no English language support at all) was fantastic. I found the songs and games helped to reinforce some of my existing vocabulary and expand on it with new words that I could work out from the context (and then confirm using a dictionary). Repeating the songs and games helped it to sink in a little better, and even just pottering around on the site for half-an-hour made me feel like I was making progress.

So, I'd play a game, or watch a song, and think, "Oh, good lord, that was horrible - I must do that again." At no point did it get any less horrible, but I actually had to drag myself away.

The whole site is like an exercise in Yin and Yang. The horribleness and the usefulness hugging tightly to each other, with a little bit of the useful within the horrible, and a little bit of the horrible within the useful.

Then again, maybe I'm just desperate for interactive resources that are beyond the "hey, let's introduce you to this crazy language" stage, but not as advanced as everything else I can find.

All I want, people, is for someone to remake French in Action in Estonian and make it a bit more computer friendly. Is that too much to ask?

Yes, I know there's Eesti Keel ja Meel, which is trying to do the French in Action thing with the framing story (right down to the blond chick in the long skirts), but it really doesn't have the same approach to vocabulary. In FiA, they would grab the key vocabulary and phrases and repeat them in multiple contexts with different people (and a mime). EKjM wastes valuable time each "episode" showing you pretty pictures of the countryside when it could be giving you extra vocabulary/grammar lessons. The exercises you can do aren't really as good as multiple and varied exposure to the vocabulary.

That said, I don't mind EKjM. I think the way they are trying to do the FiA framing story is kind of cute. It just feels like they couldn't quite figure out if they wanted to create a language programme or a tourism brochure.

At least that Mudila thing knows what it is. It's not a very good whatever it is, but it's not trying to sell you the "Visit Estonia!" package at the same time. Maybe Estonian preschoolers aren't on the "Visit Estonia!" hit list.