Re: Vocatives

On Aug 25, 9:05 pm, DKleinecke <dkleine...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
English does not have a vocative case. Apparently Common Indo-European
did and most people know it survived into Classical Latin. (Et tu,
Brute). The unnatural English "O" deserves nothing but the ridicule it
gets.

My question is: What does it feel like to speak a language with a
vocative?

The problem comes up in translating. The specific example I was
confronted with is from the Qur'an (that Arabic, at least, has a
vocative - a prefix "ya:-"). In the course of a narrative Pharaoh
speaks to Moses and starts out (in an unsatisfactory translation) "O
Moses .. ". The natural way to translate that would be "Pharaoh said
to Moses "..." but this is less literal (and we already have enough
trouble with Muslims who think the Qur'an cannot be translated).

Is there any better way to imitate the feeling of a vocative in a
language without one?

But English does have a vocative case that functions exactly like the
vocative case in other indo-european languages like Latin and Polish.
The only difference is that the English vocative cannot be formally
distinguished from the nominative, having long ago merged with it in
form, but not function.

There are various ways of accentuating the fact that a particular word
or name is vocative, such as "O", "Hey", and "Dear". However, these
are not essential, and often sound artificial, though, as you have
noticed.

There is no difference in "feeling" between the English vocative and
the vocative in Latin and Slavic languages. The difference is solely
in form. Also, in Latin and Polish, the form of the vocative case is
distinguishable from the form of the nominative only for certain noun
declensions, and not for others.

What you are asking is really a question of style. In the example you
give about Pharaoh speaking to Moses, using an unadorned vocative
seems overly familiar and informal, which clashes with the register
expected for this type of writing. However, this is a matter of
English style only, and has its roots in the history of Biblical
translation in English. The unadorned vocative does not have this
effect in Latin or Polish, for example. This has nothing to do with
the fact that the vocative in Latin and Polish is sometimes formally
distinguishable from the nominative, though.

The reason that "Hear, O Israel, the Lord, thy God, is one" and
"Listen, Israel, the Lord, your God, is one" "feel" different is
purely a matter of English style and the conventions of English
biblical translation. A skillful translator can convey some of the
feeling of the style of the original by carefully using different
English stylistic techniques and conventions, but these do not
necessarily correspond to the stylistic techniques and conventions of
the original language, and with languages as different from English as
Hebrew and Arabic, probably differ quite radically.

Dominic Bojarski



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