32·
8 months agoCan we finally get mixed zoning??
- 1 Post
- 8 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
Cake day: June 6th, 2023
You are not logged in. If you use a Fediverse account that is able to follow users, you can follow this user.
OK, I kinda get it. However, I will still be drawing a rage comic about this once I get a graphics tablet.
Rage comic idea
◰ Kid: *sings to a sing-along video on their tablet* “♪ now I know my ABCs ♫”
◳ Ghost of Karl Marx: *appears* “DON’T SAY THAT!”
Kid: *shocked*◱ Karl Marx: *monologue all over the panel* “The modern Latin alphabet is not your private property! It is in the public domain, the collective ownership of mankind, and used by all English speakers as well as by literate people all over the world with minor variations. Billions of lives were made easier with a common writing system and a standard ordering of its glyphs. Learning what countless other children in the past few centuries have mastered does not give you the right to claim ownership of this knowledge and, in fact,…”
Kid: “Oh my god!”◲ Karl Marx: *slaps kid with Das Kapital* (or maybe a better punchline, IDK)
You need not to interpret this as a literally-meant possessive
I don’t, mir is not a possessive. The sentence could be literally translated as “For me, [it] is cold”. The feeling of cold is the speaker’s perspective expressed logically.
But why use my ABCs rather than the ABCs? The alphabet is the same for everyone, the feeling of cold in a location is not.
Imagine YouTuber describing a vintage computer: “…above the keyboard, you’ll find your cursor keys,” knowing that 99 % of their viewers never owned that type of computer.
How do you explain that case?
That’s absolutely valid use of personal pronouns.
Mir ist kalt.
We say exactly this for “I am cold” in Czech. I have no problems with that nor your other examples, as they actually refer to the first person’s perspective. It is them who is cold and the general pronoun man would not make sense.
However, imagine a YouTuber showing off a vintage computer, saying “above the keyboard, you’ll find your cursor keys” to the audience. As a viewer who most likely does not own such a computer, in no sense of the word are the keys mine.
I can understand German and my native language is Czech. Could you provide some German examples? What you described (which I imagine could be im Nebel so dick dass du deine Füße nicht sehen könntest/in fog so thick that you could not see your feet) seems like an entirely normal use of personal pronouns to me (though the generic pronoun man/one would be better to use in formal writing in the previous example, as the perspective is objective). And yes, I did not use dative but I don’t think this would be bound to a specific declension form.
H LIES IN A PNEAPPE