David Nalley wrote:
I may be showing my ignorance here.....but I thought that since
Fedora is a trademark, and a proper name that it was always Fedora.
Much as I am always David regardless of what country I may be in or
language I may be speaking.
Short answer: No
A longer and more complete answer:
Inflected languages inflect proper nouns as well (including trademarks).
It's worth keeping in mind that these inflections are not just something
"tacked onto" the noun; they represents a fundamentally different way of
structuring the language from the way that Modern English does it.
They're an essential part of how these languages work, which is
counter-intuitive for English speakers.
To stick with the previous example, if people were talking about you in
Czech:
Subject in a sentence: David
Possessive: Davida
"David's book" -> "Kniha Davida"
Direct object in a sentence: Davida
Indirect object of a sentence: Davidovi
Vocative: Davide
"Hey David!" -> "Ahoj Davide!"
I'm on shaky ground here with the specifics, so I'll leave it at that.
Note that English has a tiny remnant of this as well; your name changes
from "David" to "David's" to indicate possession. [1]
To give you an idea of the range of languages for which this is an
issue, they include, just in Europe, all the Slavic languages (eg.
Russian, Czech, Polish, Serbian, Croatian and many many more) the
Finno-Ugaric languages (Finnish, Hungarian, Estonian and others – these
have a /highly/ complex case system), as well as Turkish, Greek, and
Armenian.
Note that so far, I've only discussed the way that grammatical case can
change nouns, but languages change nouns for other reasons too, such as
to affix or suffix articles onto them.
Cheers
Rudi
[1] Old English (Anglo-Saxon) also had a system of inflected endings for
nouns, but with only four cases, rather than Czech's seven and
Hungarian's seventeen. The possessive singular ending for masculine
nouns in Anglo-Saxon was "es" (so "David's book" -> "Davides boke").
This carried over into Middle English for almost all nouns, regardless
of grammatical gender or number. Modern English retains an apostrophe to
show where an "e" has been left out for the past 600 years or so, in
precisely the same way that the apostrophe in "don't" shows where an "o"
has been left out.
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