I wanted to dwell a little bit on this whole thing with cases. As a native Swedish-speaker, I am not that used to that. It doesn’t help that my second language is English. Not much cases there either. One of few exception is with pronounce, where we differentiate between I/ me and he/ him and so on.
However, speakers of other languages are more used to using different cases. When trying to find a way how to think about this, I ended up considering each sentence as a little story.
A story always have actors that fulfil different roles in the play.
Let’s go back to our tried and true sentence “The man loves the woman!”. Granted, not much of a story, but we can see the cast:
The one who loves – The man
The one who is loved – The woman.
A simple categorisation here is that the man is the subject, and the woman is the object. The subject is the main actor, the one doing something. The object is… part of the supporting cast. Kinda.
So, whenever you read a sentence, think about who is the main actor in this story, and what other roles there are.
While Swedish for the most part only have two cases for nouns (with genitive being the second one), Ukrainian has… seven. I think. This means that we should be able to find seven different roles.
Let’s start with two roles that can be tricky to discern. Accusative and dative.
The difference between these two are a bit nuanced. They are both the recipients of an action, but more or less direct. In our sample love-filled sentence, the woman is clearly the direct recipient of the mans love. That makes her fill the accusative role. My own way to remember this is to connect it to the word “accuse”, and imagine someone pointing a finger directly at someone.
Dative, on the other hand, is a bit trickier. More indirect. One example I’ve seen is if you give something to someone.
The man gives flowers to the woman!
Let’s look at the cast and the story.
Who is the main actor? It’s the man!
What does he do? He gives something!
What is the direct focus for the giving? It’s the flowers! Imagine the main pointing at the flowers “I give YOU to this woman!”. That makes the flowers the accusative object.
But, you might say, the woman is ALSO the target for the giving. Yes! But, consider these two alternatives. You can say “I give flowers”. We still don’t know to whom, but we know that I give some flowers. It’s perfectly clear. “I give to the woman” on the other hand can’t stand on it’s own. It’s much more vague.
Or in other words, the giving of flowers is the main action of this sentence. The woman, while important, does stand just a little bit outside of it. That makes her take on the role of dative.
To sum up:
- The actor of a sentence is (almost) always the subject.
- The direct target of the action is the accusative object.
- The one being pointed at when saying “I <action> you!!”
- You can write the sentence with just the subject, the action and the accusative, and it makes sense
- The indirect target is the dative object.
- The one being affected by the main event in some way is often the dative object.
- A sentence with just the subject, the action and the dative object often feels like it’s lacking something
Ok, this text was a bit long, but I hope it made a little sense at least. In future posts, I will look at the other different roles we can find in a Ukrainian sentence.