what does 'come undone' mean?

@JohanLarsson It means come apart, go wrong, etc.

ok ty

If something has come undone it has gone from a state of order to one of great disorder.

ok

Wolf sings like he plays.

One of the best ever.

must sleep, nite

@rogermue: Continuing the conversation from english.stackexchange.com/a/29946/303 : There were two reasons I didn't understand your original comment.

Firstly, I'm unfamiliar with the use of numbers to indicate case in that way. Out of interest, why is object case indicated with the number 4? What do 2 and 3 represent?

Secondly, it would made your comment a lot clearer if the quotes had been placed in quotation marks, with other words in either quotation marks or italics to indicate that they're being referred to.

So adding some quotation marks to your comment: "What 1 happened?" Not: "What 1 did happen?" - "What 1" means "what" is nominative. Question without "to do".

PS: Thank you for the suggested English exercises. However, I should point out that I'm British, and English is my first language. :-)

@SteveMelnikoff He won't get a notification unless he/she has been in the chat before. Either leave a comment inviting them to chat or get a mod to call them for you.

@rogermue @SteveMelnikoff is chatting with you here.

@terdon Thank you; I did indeed place a link to here in a comment.

Ah. Oh, well then.

:)

Useful to know anyway; I don't use chat often! :)

@SteveMelnikoff Perhaps you should switch your gravatar to a bowler and a brolly. That way people won't get confused. ^_^

Hi, Steve, now I found my way to the chat room. You seem to have difficulty with my short notation for cases.

@rogermue I've never seen it before.

@Robusto :-)

In latin grammar the cases are 1 nominative, 2 genitive, 3 dative, 4 accusative. If I write John1 it is nominative or subject case. John 4 is accusative or object case.

@rogermue You forgot 5 ablative.

Then there are vocative and locative.

@Cerberus You were just lurking in case a Latin comment came up, weren't you.

@rogermue if I remember correctly (it was a long time ago), when I learnt Latin, we were taught the cases in a different order.

@Robusto You know me too well.

@SteveMelnikoff Hi! This is the conventional order.

Just as in Greek and German.

@rogermue Is the use of numbers common when learning English?

@Cerberus Like a polar bear poised above a seal's breathing hole you are.

@Robusto I swear he has a userscript that sends him pings if /.*latin.*/i

@SteveMelnikoff I've never seen it.

@terdon It's true.

@Robusto A polar dog, yes.

Bears are related to dogs.

@terdon Haha I don't need it, apparently.

(As a rare visitor to chat, I'm enjoying this. :-) )

Hmm so they are.

@Robusto Much to the bitch's distress.

I only ever see numbers used to indicate the conjugations (Roman numerals) and declinations (probably Arabic numerals).

How do you write the possessive of bitch? Bitch's seems weird.

No, this use is not common. It is my way to show cases. I write a lot about languages and I do it short. Subject case and object case gets cumbersome when you have to write it five times.

@terdon That's how I would spell it...

@terdon Weird, but right.

@rogermue The more common notation I've seen is to indicate subject or object in brackets after the noun, e.g. (s) or (o), or (subj) or (obj), etc.

@rogermue Or...make an Autohotkey script to do it for you!

@rogermue Ah - so you see my confusion. Not being familiar with your work (nor being familiar with how English is taught as a foreign language), I'd never seen this before.

Although I think (acc.) doesn't take that long to write.

I know I will sound like a mean cur now, but I must quote myself:

@rogermue Note that when English is studied is a first language, we don't refer to cases at all, as (modern) English doesn't have them in the way that German or Latin do.

What1 is one additional sign. What (s) are 56 or six clicks on keys, you have to change from small letters to smbols to get the brackets . That is cumbersome.

@rogermue True - but if you're using an uncommon abbreviation without first explaining what it means, you're not helping anyone.

@Robusto Story of my life.

@Cerberus That's a good rule.

That is the problem. As to who or what natives have no feeling for cases. That is the fault of teaching methods. Without a feeling for cases it is difficult to understand the system of language.

@rogermue Surely cases (in the German or Latin sense) are only relevant to languages which have them? The subject/object model is a much better fit for English.

Sorry, that I used what 1 and what4. I thought it was self-evident from the example sentences. In earlier posts I have explained my short notation.

@rogermue Fair enough!

@rogermue Regarding the original question, my further comments ended up in another chat channel: chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/24809/…

@rogermue You could make an Autohotkey script to automatically turn 1qq into (nom.).

English has the same cases, but the form of subject and object case is mostly identical. You see the case from the position in the sentence.

But is it really so difficult for you to understand who1 and who4?

Now that you've explained it, it makes sense.

@rogermue It is if you've never seen the notation before.

My point was (a) it's not obvious without the explanation; and (b) as a native speaker, I don't think of English as having cases - though having studied Latin and German, I can of course understand what they mean.

By the way, you might want to change your username. I'm sure many users of the British persuasion might misconstrue it as roger me :)

@terdon On behalf of all British users, I can honestly say that that never occurred to me. :-)

Incidentally, having had a quick look around the web in the last few minutes, the consensus seems to be that English does indeed have cases - but that they are much weaker and less well defined than in many other languages.

Curious that natives think English has no cases, just because there are no endings. In English the position is a marker for cases. You always know what is subject and and object, don't you.

It's an interesting topic. All I can say is that at school, the words "subject" and "object" were used a lot, but I don't recall "case" being mentioned.

@SteveMelnikoff I kept reading it that way. Honest!

It may be to do with where you're starting from. If you're a native German speaker, then I can imagine that using the case terminology makes a lot of sense.

Rogermue stands for Roger Munich. And I have the same username in all forums.

@rogermue Fair enough, I guessed it was your name. I just honestly read is as rogerme a few times.

Anyway, yes, I wouldn't have said that English has cases. I'd never thought of it that way. And this despite being raised a Greek/English bilingual and the former having cases.

Well, back to our topic, subject questions. Do you look through?

Sorry, look through what?

@rogermue I would not say position marks caces; position marks syntactic function, but not cases.

Subject questions. Who was it? What happened ? What is a maverick?

Cases, too, can mark syntactic function: cases and position can do the same thing.

English has cases in its personal pronouns, I/me etc.

@rogermue The original question, and my answer, alluded to "emphatic do" - i.e. the addition of the verb "to do" to emphasise a point.

See, for example: doctorsspeakup.com/content/using-emphatic-do and grammar.about.com/od/e/g/Emphatic-do.htm

@rogermue That only works so long as the concept exists in all the languages we're talking about. As we've discussed, English can be regarded as having cases - so long as the student understands that English cases are different in some ways from cases in some other languages.

I know the view, English has no cases because it has no endings , it has no future because the is no ending for future tense and so on. That is a wron and narrow-minded view.

What about French? Again, it's been a while, but I don't remember French being taught as having cases.

...at least, when it's being taught to native English speakers.

OK.

@rogermue I've seen some of the arguments about English having no future tense. They strike me as being very technical, and seem to come down to precise definitions of particular linguistic terms.

Steve , I would like to leave, unless you still have some questions.

No; this has been a very interesting discussion. Any questions for me?

No, not at the moment. But we can talk again, whenever you wish. You only have to tell me how to get to a chat room.

There's a link to "chat" at the bottom of every page.

Ah, I see. Thanks and bye.

Bye bye!

@Cerberus I learned the order of the cases as: non, acc, bal, dat, gen. For Latin. Which I realize is not classical. I wonder if mine is a newer way? Also for Getman: nom, acc, dat, gen (dropping abl).

@SteveMelnikoff case is mostly useless in English except for pronouns. And even that is slowly going away: ''Between you and me'

You can arrange the cases in any order you want and yor find different arrangement in various language. But it is useful to have a standard order. I take the Latin order as used in German Grammars of Latin. We have a standard order for the letters of the alphabet and it is practical. So I have a standard order for the cases.

@Mitch I know some school books use this order, also in France, but it is not the conventional order, as you say.

@rogermue It is useful to speak of syntactical functions, such as subject, object, indirect object, adverbial phrase, etc. Those exist independently of cases and generally exist in all Indo-European languages. However, case is a morphological category; it is on a lower level than syntax. It makes sense to say that an instrument ("he killed her with a dagger) is the same syntactical category in all languages, called an instrument.

But, in Latin, it is expressed as an ablative, whereas, in Greek, it is a dative, and in German/English you have to use a preposition. It does not make sense to say that Greek has an ablative, let alone that an instrument is in the ablative case in Greek. So case and syntactical function are on different levels. It does make sense to say that English has a subject case and an object case (or nominative and accusative), but not that it has an ablative. It does have instruments, though.

Or perhaps instrument is even a semantic category rather than a syntactic category; perhaps the syntactical category here is an adverbial phrase, or a prepositional phrase.

@Rob

@Rob psychology of browsing

nice @JohanLarsson thanks for sharing :)

I should have written Rob & @All

Rob is the only one I know work with web here

the scrolling part is true for me

I often look at the scrollbar and close the page :)

me too

@JohanLarsson Goood point.

A great case study is one done by the U.S. Census Bureau.

They found that most people came to their site looking for the current population of the United States.

So what did they do? They made a huge display box for the current population figure, setting it off with lots of fancy bordering and coloring and what have you. You literally couldn't miss it.

Well, except people did.

They missed it big time.

:)

In fact, something like 40% of the visitors who came looking for the population figure actually GAVE UP.

Because the population number was so big that everyone thought it was some kind of ad.

lol

So they gave up and Googled the information instead.

People would scroll past the big gaudy number to get it out of the way and get down to the REAL information.

Which is usually way down on the page somewhere.

now that^ is a classic