Nearly Forgot!

It's surprisingly hard to come up with thing to ramble about, when one's put under pressure. Could that sentence phrasing be more british-sounding, I wonder? At any rate, I think maybe I did something today... well, school, including Latin, what with declensions and all.

Latin has the most declensions I've seen in any language, what with nouns typically declining not only according to number but to five different cases -- though it should be noted that often in either plural or singular or both the Dative and Ablative cases are combined. It's a little scary when you first look at it, but when you think about it, English declines according to a lot of those cases too, but only with our pronouns.

A case and all of the fancy names for them (Nominative, Genitive, Dative, Accusative and Ablative) is really just a fancy linguistics term for what a noun does in a sentence. A noun in the Nominative case is just a pretty way of saying the Subject of a sentence. Genitive is talking about possessives ("Joe's" is in the Genitive case), Dative speaks of an Indirect Object in a sentence, Accusative the Direct Object, and Ablative is Object of the Preposition. In English we decline some of our pronouns according to some of these cases. "I" is in the Nominative case, "mine" or "my" is for Genitive, and "me" is for the rest. Pretty much every English noun declines to Genitive case, and almost all decline according to number (words like "sheep" and "moose" and "fish" being the exceptions). At least Latin's regular about it.

There are three declensions in Latin, with five cases and singular and plural each. I suppose that makes a total of 30 individual endings to memorize, though that doesn't take into account the cases that get combined in one declension or another.

Um, what else did I do today? I got a piano lesson, and my British diction is likely from listening to quite a bit of Jane Austen lately. I got a little Python studied... Oh! I also just now started working on learning a Dvorak keyboard layout. I'm not typing this blog post in it, but they say that typing with Dvorak is much faster than with Qwerty. We'll see. It is learning a new layout, but my Neo supports it, and it's easy to change the layout on a computer, so... We'll see.