Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2019 September 14

= September 14 =

Vocative of ego
Is there one? I know this is an old question, but it bends my brain. Temerarius (talk) 20:02, 14 September 2019 (UTC)
 * We don't have an article called "Vocative of ego" So what are you talking about? ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 22:20, 14 September 2019 (UTC)
 * OP is rather obviously asking for the vocative of ego. DuncanHill (talk) 22:32, 14 September 2019 (UTC)
 * Wiktionary declension of ego here. DuncanHill (talk) 22:29, 14 September 2019 (UTC)
 * I would like to see an example where "ego" is used as a vocative. Even when one addresses one's self, isn't that usually done in the second person? ("Sluzzelin, you really made a fool of yourself") When using "I" is one ever addressing "I"? My old dusty Latin grammar book, only featured the vocative for "tu" and "vos", but not for "ego" and "nos". Maybe a case could be made for "nos", but I'm really struggling with imagining a sentence where "I" is being addressed by the speaker. ---Sluzzelin talk  00:30, 15 September 2019 (UTC)
 * I found this which says "Addressing Jupiter and the other Olympian deities at Martianus Capella Marriage of Philology and Mercury 3.325, the personified Grammar draws attention to many irregular word-forms, and asks why ego has only the one form, but Minerva interrupts her for fear that she may bore her audience. It may seem obvious that ego has no vocative (most people talk to themselves in the second person), but the ancient grammarians repeatedly take pains to point this out, and Virgilius Maro Grammaticus, without doubt the most eccentric of all grammarians, reports that Terrentius and the splendidly named Galbungus wrangled over the point for fourteen days and fourteen nights. (Like Virgilius, they may have been 7th-cent. Irish monks.) Bodl. Gr. Inscr. 3019 is a 3rd century AD Greek schooltext which includes declension of the pronouns “I”, “this”, “he” and “that”, all of them containing the vocative (always the same as the nominative)" which may or may not help. It comes up in The Name of the Rose too. DuncanHill (talk) 00:38, 15 September 2019 (UTC)


 * First off, the Latin vocative has a very different function than the other Latin cases. The other cases indicate what the relationship is of that word to other words and phrases in the same sentence (subject of verb, object of verb or preposition, etc).  However, the vocative case indicates that the word is part of a separate clause, with a lack of grammatical relationship to other words in the sentence (except adjacent words in direct apposition).
 * Second, in the Latin language, the vocative case is only distinct in the singular of second declension non-neuters (see Latin declension). In all other inflectional paradigms, the vocative is identical in form with the nominative.  Since the first person pronoun isn't part of the second declension, there's no expectation of a distinct inflectional form... AnonMoos (talk) 02:39, 15 September 2019 (UTC)


 * As a native speaker of a language which has vocative (among a bunch of other cases) I've never asked myself whether personal pronouns have a vocative... 93.136.115.136 (talk) 08:28, 15 September 2019 (UTC)
 * But if you did, how would you say it? {The poster formerly known as 87.81.230.195} 90.202.210.107 (talk) 08:41, 15 September 2019 (UTC)
 * . --  Jack of Oz   [pleasantries]  00:53, 16 September 2019 (UTC)