Talk:Nominative case

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Contents 1 Restored "you" = 2 Predicative nominative 3 I don't understand 4 Predicate nominative - again

[edit] Restored "you" =

I've just shifted you from the list of archaic usages, and put it in its correct case (you is the nominative, ye the accusative). thefamouseccles 01:42 27 Oct 2003 (UTC)

This is incorrect; it is the other way around. — Timwi 12:56, 23 Apr 2004 (UTC)

Both of you are incorrect. Here is a declension table for second person pronouns.

	Singular	Plural
Nom.	you	ye
Acc.	you	you
Gen.	your/yours	your/yours

	Singular	Plural
Nom.	thou	ye
Acc.	thee	you
Gen.	thy/thine	your/yours

The thou set are informal and the you set are formal --67.42.149.139 21:08, 1 April 2007 (UTC)

67.42.149.139 (talk) 21:07, 1 April 2007 (UTC).

[edit] Predicative nominative

Question: Does this exist? Is 'mine' in 'The book is mine' in the predicative nominative case? If it were possesive, shouldn't it be: This is 'my' book. --Confused

It is a predicate nominitive. However, "predicate nominitive" isn't a case itself. It just happens to be always in the subjective case. --Davidstrauss 23:41, 12 April 2006 (UTC)

[edit] I don't understand

This article did nothing to help ease my confusion on the subject. It starts off by saying it's the "grammatical case" (while linking to declension) and goes downhil from there. Can someone add an example or something? I was reading in Thou that "you" is both the nominative and objective case in modern English, but in days of old it was "tha" and "thee". I understand the "thee" but "tha"? I had no idea. And I still don't, because I don't know what the nominative case is. --Cyde 04:49, 21 November 2005 (UTC)

Clyde: For your information, you are correct that you is both nominative and accusative. That it used to be 'thou' is a myth. Thou, thee, thy, thine are the informal pronouns of english, and you, you, your, yours are the formal pronouns. Now, we only use you. As to "tha" and "thee", it was "thou" and "thee" in early modern english; in old english it was þu and þec. The only time I ever remember seeing 'tha' somewhere would be the old english plural third person pronoun, but I do not believe that that is relevant right now. --67.42.149.139 21:00, 1 April 2007 (UTC)

I hope it's a bit clearer now. I've reordered the paragraphs, clarifying a few things and fixing the grammatical case link. I thought it would be very easy to give examples in Latin or Greek, but I don't know the languages and, to my surprise, I couldn't find a single suitable example in Latin grammar or Greek language that illustrates the main points. --Pablo D. Flores (Talk) 11:09, 21 November 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Predicate nominative - again

Don't predicate nominatives just confuse things? For example: "A square is a rectangle," and "A rectangle is a square," are two sentences with totally different meanings (and one of them is always true, while the other is not always true), but if we treat both "rectangle" and "square" as nominatives, then there is no difference between the two. Treating one as the subject and one as the object of "to be" clears things up nicely. Linguofreak 22:07, 22 April 2006 (UTC)

• It's still not the way the language works formally or in practice. --Davidstrauss 08:02, 11 May 2006 (UTC)

English, (or at least American colloquial English) doesn't use predicate nominatives. It treats the second argument of "be" as an accusative (as in "it's me"). I suppose a better question would be why the languages that do use predicate nominatives use them. What gramatical confusion is cleared up by a predicate nominative? Linguofreak 14:13, 8 August 2006 (UTC)

Very true. Thanks for that, Linguofreak.--67.42.149.139 21:10, 1 April 2007 (UTC)