Case-forms of quoted phrases

[alice]

Consider a sentence like "The head of 'the dog's head' is 'head'". How is the genitive of the quoted phrase expressed in languages where the genitive is otherwise always expressed with an inflection of some sort (i.e. synthetically) and never with a preposition or similar?

[zompist]

I don't know— you'd have to check, say, syntax papers in Russian— but I can answer a related question: do you decline titles in Russian? And you do. Examples:

Летом 1909 года один из посетителей Ясной Поляны выражал свой восторг и благодарность за создание «Войны и мира» и «Анны Карениной». In the summer of 1909, one of the visitors to Yasnaya Polyana expressed his delight and gratitude for the creation of War and Peace and Anna Karenina.

«Войну и мир», сначала носившую название «1805 год», он начал писать в феврале 1863-го. He began writing War and Peace, originally titled 1805, in February 1863.

If your Russian is rusty, the title of the book is Война и мир (nominative); the first example puts it in the genitive, the second in the accusative.

But another rule of Russian is that you don't decline things that can't be declined. E.g. кино 'cinema' and метро 'metro' are not declined, so you say things like Я иду в кино. Рельсы метро сломаны. "I'm going to the cinema. The tracks of the metro are broken."

So my guess is that in Russian you would just write "голова собаки" and not decline it.

For a similar phenomenon, many names in Akkadian are theophoric sentences— e.g Nabû-kudurri-uṣur "Nabû, watch over my heir" = Nebuchadnezzar. And they're not declined in Akkadian.

[Ahzoh]

I don't know— you'd have to check, say, syntax papers in Russian— but I can answer a related question: do you decline titles in Russian? And you do. Examples:

Летом 1909 года один из посетителей Ясной Поляны выражал свой восторг и благодарность за создание «Войны и мира» и «Анны Карениной». In the summer of 1909, one of the visitors to Yasnaya Polyana expressed his delight and gratitude for the creation of War and Peace and Anna Karenina.

«Войну и мир», сначала носившую название «1805 год», он начал писать в феврале 1863-го. He began writing War and Peace, originally titled 1805, in February 1863.

If your Russian is rusty, the title of the book is Война и мир (nominative); the first example puts it in the genitive, the second in the accusative.

But another rule of Russian is that you don't decline things that can't be declined. E.g. кино 'cinema' and метро 'metro' are not declined, so you say things like Я иду в кино. Рельсы метро сломаны. "I'm going to the cinema. The tracks of the metro are broken."

So my guess is that in Russian you would just write "голова собаки" and not decline it.

For a similar phenomenon, many names in Akkadian are theophoric sentences— e.g Nabû-kudurri-uṣur "Nabû, watch over my heir" = Nebuchadnezzar. And they're not declined in Akkadian.

Inflection of quotes, names, and titles has always been something I wondered about and struggled with.

[hwhatting]

In your example, you would quote the words exactly as they are and precede them by something like "phrase", which would be declined to express the role of the phrase in the sentence.
An example:
Подлежащим предложения «голова собаки была отрезана» является «голова собаки».
"The subject of the sentence 'the dog's head was cut off' is 'the dog's head'"
(I chose a different example because that's what I could remember the Russian grammatical terminology for.)

[Qwynegold]

In Finnish that would be:
Koiran pään pää on pää
dog-GEN head-GEN head COP head
(I don't even know how to use the quotation marks in this one.)

But a better way is to employ an epithet:
Fraasin "koiran pää" pää on "pää"
phrase-GEN dog-GEN head head COP head

In both sentences, in speech, you would put extra stress on the middle pää.

[alice]

alice is enlightened, and apologises for putting this in the wrong forum.

[bradrn]

But a better way is to employ an epithet:
Fraasin "koiran pään" pää on "pää"
phrase-GEN dog-GEN head head COP head

The text here doesn’t seem to match the gloss — I would have thought it should be "koiran pää", not "koiran pään".

[äreo]

I wonder if any languages preserve titles, add a particle or affix indicating verbatim quotation, and then append case markers. Japanese maybe?

[bradrn]

I wonder if any languages preserve titles, add a particle or affix indicating verbatim quotation, and then append case markers. Japanese maybe?

Many languages have quotative markers, but I’m not aware of any which case-mark them.

[Richard W]

I wonder if any languages preserve titles, add a particle or affix indicating verbatim quotation, and then append case markers. Japanese maybe?

Many languages have quotative markers, but I’m not aware of any which case-mark them.

Pali has a following quotative marker, and for inflection suffixes a demonstrative pronoun eta 'this', giving iti eta. which contracts to icceta, at least for words and bits of words quoted in isolation. Quite a few bits of words inflect in their own right though, so the verb stem suffix cha (as in the word gacchati) has nominative singular cho.

[alice]

But another rule of Russian is that you don't decline things that can't be declined. E.g. кино 'cinema' and метро 'metro' are not declined, so you say things like Я иду в кино. Рельсы метро сломаны. "I'm going to the cinema. The tracks of the metro are broken."

This is interesting, because the absence of a case distinction potentially creates an ambiguity; is "на метро" "to the metro" or "at the metro"? It's probably not a particulary pernicious one, but it is the kind of thing I sometimes get hung up on, e.g. by having a strange compulsion to make all case-forms of a noun distinct.

More generally, how do various languages treat things from other languages which don't cleanly fit into their inflectional or syntactical systems? I remember seeing an English proper name which ended in a consonant cluster being given a Finnish case-inflection with a hyphen (something like "zompist-ssa"; how woudl that be pronounced?). More dramatically, the word "selfie" in the Roman alphabet in the middle of some Greek text, when I would have expected something like "σελφη".

[zompist]

But another rule of Russian is that you don't decline things that can't be declined. E.g. кино 'cinema' and метро 'metro' are not declined, so you say things like Я иду в кино. Рельсы метро сломаны. "I'm going to the cinema. The tracks of the metro are broken."

This is interesting, because the absence of a case distinction potentially creates an ambiguity; is "на метро" "to the metro" or "at the metro"? It's probably not a particulary pernicious one, but it is the kind of thing I sometimes get hung up on, e.g. by having a strange compulsion to make all case-forms of a noun distinct.

Yes, it creates an ambiguity, because Russian makes a distinction between location and movement— like our "in / into" but with case. But people just live with it, if you call that living.

[hwhatting]

@alice:
It's not like English has no cases of this - e.g., there are those verbs where the present and past tense have the same form (hit, put, etc.). In most cases, context takes care of the ambiguity.
And over time, speakers may innovate analogical forms that get rid of the ambiguity; e.g., in Standard literary Russian pal'tó "coat" is indeclinable (it's a loan from French paletot), but in colloquial Russian you'll find the declined plural pól'ta (as if from an underlying singular pol'tó; unstressed /a/ and /o/ are pronounced the same).

[Travis B.]

@alice:
It's not like English has no cases of this - e.g., there are those verbs where the present and past tense have the same form (hit, put, etc.). In most cases, context takes care of the ambiguity.
And over time, speakers may innovate analogical forms that get rid of the ambiguity; e.g., in Standard literary Russian pal'tó "coat" is indeclinable (it's a loan from French paletot), but in colloquial Russian you'll find the declined plural pól'ta (as if from an underlying singular pol'tó; unstressed /a/ and /o/ are pronounced the same).

English did this with the second person, as while the standard language does not distinguish number for it, just about every English dialect has innovated a way of expressing a distinct second person plural.

[alice]

@alice:
It's not like English has no cases of this - e.g., there are those verbs where the present and past tense have the same form (hit, put, etc.). In most cases, context takes care of the ambiguity.

This present-past ambiguity also exists to an extent in French, Spanish, Latvian, Dutch, and German. It's one of those things you think shouldn't exist, but does.

[Travis B.]

@alice:
It's not like English has no cases of this - e.g., there are those verbs where the present and past tense have the same form (hit, put, etc.). In most cases, context takes care of the ambiguity.

This present-past ambiguity also exists to an extent in French, Spanish, Latvian, Dutch, and German. It's one of those things you think shouldn't exist, but does.

Note that the ambiguity does not exist for the most part in the indicative 3rd singular in English, as present indicative 3rd singular verbs take -(e)s while past indicative 3rd singular verbs do not.

[hwhatting]

This present-past ambiguity also exists to an extent in French, Spanish, Latvian, Dutch, and German. It's one of those things you think shouldn't exist, but does.

Can you give any German examples of this? I can't think of any at the moment.

[alice]

This present-past ambiguity also exists to an extent in French, Spanish, Latvian, Dutch, and German. It's one of those things you think shouldn't exist, but does.

Can you give any German examples of this? I can't think of any at the moment.

I can't think of any either; that must have fallen through a rupture in the space-time continuum.

[Travis B.]

I can't think of any German examples either.

[Richard W]

And over time, speakers may innovate analogical forms that get rid of the ambiguity; e.g., in Standard literary Russian pal'tó "coat" is indeclinable (it's a loan from French paletot), but in colloquial Russian you'll find the declined plural pól'ta (as if from an underlying singular pol'tó; unstressed /a/ and /o/ are pronounced the same).

Isn't the standard declension more of an affectation - the lower classes seem always to have declined these allegedly indeclinable words.