Talk:ja

Croatian: Translation of "ja" as "me"
The second translation given for ja, me (as in This is me), doesn't make sense. In English me is the object form of I, a case that might be called "accusative" in languages with fuller case systems. But the accusative given in the table is mȅne, me (as might be expected from the Indo-European root). Indeed, many grammatical prescriptivists say that that sentence should actually be "This is I", with the copula is joining two noun phrases in the same case. I suspect that this is a feature common to Indo-European languages (it was certainly this way in Classical Latin), and that Croatian follows the same pattern, so that inferring the translation of ja as me from this sentence is misleading. Bbi5291 00:20, 14 July 2010 (UTC)


 * As you say. I don't speak Croatian, but it looks like a definition like this:
 * : I, me.
 * Ja sam učio. — I have studied.
 * ''Ovo sam ja. — This is me.
 * would probably be best. Or maybe "nominative singular form", "first-person personal pronoun", since the declension table seems to treat them singular and plural as both being of a single pronoun, though that seems very counter-intuitive to me. Either way. Do you like either of those options?
 * (By the way, I only know three Indo-European languages, so I can't give you a full survey, but I can say that French is like English in using oblique forms — in its case the "prepositional" or "stress" pronouns moi, toi, and so on — as the default pronoun forms. Spanish, however, is like Classical Latin.)
 * —Ruakh TALK 01:11, 14 July 2010 (UTC)


 * Yes, that looks appropriate. Incidentally, I also "know" French and Spanish, but am not well-versed in their history (whereas I do recall reading that Old English has forms that, in Modern English, would look like "This is I" or "He is taller than I".) Bbi5291 23:38, 14 July 2010 (UTC)