Description
In the sentence He sees the woman, "he" is the subject of the sentence, while in The woman sees him, "him" is the object. In English we distinguish the two uses by different forms of the pronoun: he/him. If, however, instead of a pronoun, we use a noun, we make no such distinction in the form of the word. Thus, we use the same word "man" in both The man sees the woman and The woman sees the man. In many languages, however, different forms of the word are used not only for pronouns, but for nouns too. For example, in Latin The man sees the woman = Vir feminam videt, while The woman sees the man = Femina virum videt. For "man", Latin uses "vir" for the subject, and "virum" for the an object. Likewise, in the same pair of sentences, we have "femina" for a subject and "feminam" for object. The form used for the direct object ("him", "virum", "feminam") is known as the "accusative case", while the form used for the subject ("he", "vir", "femina") is known as the nominative case.
Just as with pronouns nouns, many inflected languages make distinctions between cases for adjectives and (for languages that have them) articles. Thus in German, "the car" as the subject of a sentence may be expressed as der Wagen. This is the form in the nominative case. If this article/noun pair is used as the object of a verb, becomes den Wagen, the accusative. In this example, the noun does not change, but the definite article is der in the nominative but den in the accusative case.
Read more about this topic: Accusative Case
Famous quotes containing the word description:
“I was here first introduced to Joe.... He was a good-looking Indian, twenty-four years old, apparently of unmixed blood, short and stout, with a broad face and reddish complexion, and eyes, methinks, narrower and more turned up at the outer corners than ours, answering to the description of his race. Besides his underclothing, he wore a red flannel shirt, woolen pants, and a black Kossuth hat, the ordinary dress of the lumberman, and, to a considerable extent, of the Penobscot Indian.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“He hath achieved a maid
That paragons description and wild fame;
One that excels the quirks of blazoning pens.”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)
“Whose are the truly labored sentences? From the weak and flimsy periods of the politician and literary man, we are glad to turn even to the description of work, the simple record of the month’s labor in the farmer’s almanac, to restore our tone and spirits.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)