Interesting. Never knew about this. <br><br>Can I put requests here? Oh good:)<br><br>I'd love to hear an explanation of cases. When I learned Arabic, the concept of cases and case markers gave me some trouble. I've forgotten a lot of the details but a tanween is an example of a case marker. You'd put it on words and it would change the pronunciation even the the spelling would not usually lend itself to that spelling. As is typical of native speakers, I never really studied English so I'm not sure how the concept of cases works in English. It seems that a lot of the grammatical intricacies of cases (along with many other things) gets thrown out in informal spoken Arabic but in other languages, like Russian, cases are important even in conversations, or so I've heard. <br><br>I think it would also be interesting to talk about how language is taught and expected to be used in formal situations as opposed to every day, casual use. What is more important in shaping the language and how much does one influence the other? How does that differ across cultures?<br><br>Lastly, I'm curious about something that I think was formalized by Wittgenstein, the idea that language structures thoughts. Lots of questions there... Is knowing the language essential if you want to learn the culture? And then that leads to my last question of which version of the language? Do native speakers of different languages actually have different thought constructions? What about multi lingual people? <br><br>I've been enjoying the videos, looking forward to more:),(reply>), @isaacc7 we don't really have overt cases in english, but one place we do see them is on pronouns:<br>the sentence "he hit him," has two versions of the third person masculine singular pronoun: "he" is the subject in the nominative case, and "him" is the object and gets the accusative. other languages do this for all nouns and distinguish not just doers and receivers of actions but instruments, locations and more, so you might get a sentence like "Bill-os hit Ted-om [with] a stick-en [at] the house-a." English is really strict about its word order and pre-/post-positions because nouns almost always look the same, but when you use case endings you can say "the house-a Ted-om hit  a stick-en Bill-os" to have the same meaning as the sentence above, but focusing on different parts of the event. as languages change over time they might become more or less inflected for case. latin had seven cases for nouns, pronouns, and adjectives, but in modern french, like english, you only see this in the nominative and accusative pronouns (Je/moi, tu/toi etc). i dont know arabic but i'm guessing based on your comment that it's becoming a less case-dependent language, but when you learn formal arabic they want to teach a """more proper""" version (cf. french classes insisting you negate using ne...pas: "Je ne sais pas" but in quebecois french you almost never actually say "ne" in conversation: "Je sais pas") whereas Russian speakers are keeping their cases system going.<br><br><br>as for your last question, linguistic determinism has largely been rejected by modern linguists. i remember a recent ted talk about chinese speakers being better with saving money because they dont have a real future tense and so they dont think of "present" and "future" as different times. frankly that sounds bogus to me but admittedly i havent done a ton of research on the topic. you might like The Great Eskimo Vocabulary Hoax by Geoffrey Pullum (~6 pages and easily found through google). it touches on linguistic determinism and is otherwise just a delightful read.  Steven Pinker's The Language Instinct is a great book too if you're looking for something longer.,(reply>), @isaacc7 English doesn't really have cases beyond nominative and a bit of accusative (he - him), so I can see why they'd be an unfamiliar concept to you. Like English, Norwegian doesn't really have genitive as a separate case, and most dialects have lost dative as well, so the first time I encountered cases was when learning German. Thankfully, there are only four cases there — imagine trying to learn Finnish, with its 14 cases, as an adult!