Errors of inflection in languages other than English -- more common or less common in very inflected languages?

Question

Note: While a question similar has been suggested and the replies indicate that even uneducated Russians do not make mistakes as even educated English speakers tend to, I am firstly not convinced this is true and secondly, if it is true (and can be substantiated) what is the reason for this? Could, for example, it be the case that English speakers make the "I/Me" sort of mistakes because declension is such a minor part of English whereas it is a huge part of Russian and therefore Russian speakers have a better understanding of the concept of case?

I frankly find it hard to believe that "I/Me" mistakes are limited to English, but if this is true, I would like to understand why this is.

It is very common in English to use "me" instead of the correct "I" and vice versa -- similar with "who" and "whom" etc.

I am asking if such errors happen more frequently in Russian, for example, which has more complex declensions or perhaps because declension is more common in that language, native speakers are in fact less likely to mix up cases.

Answer 1

It's important to distinguish two types of mistakes here.

Descriptive mistakes are when someone violates their own internal understanding of how the language works. Thinking one word and saying another, for example, would be a descriptive mistake—even to the speaker, it's wrong.

Prescriptive mistakes are when someone violates the rules they've been explicitly taught about the language. The rule to not end sentences with prepositions, for example, or to not say "ain't", would fall into this category. When someone says "let me finish up", they generally don't perceive that as an error at all, unless someone corrects them on it.

The key is, in a language like Russian, case marking is part of speakers' internal knowledge of the language. Very few people grow up speaking Russian without absorbing the case markings. But in English, the distinction between "who" and "whom" is usually taught explicitly in school, not something people absorb naturally as they learn. It's something people have to remind themselves to use instead of coming naturally.

Even more so for the difference between "I" and "me". The prescriptive rules about those say to use them the way they're used in Latin, hence "it is I" instead of "it is me". But English isn't Latin, and practically every speaker of English would naturally prefer "it is me" there, and wouldn't consider it an error.

Answer 2

I frankly find it hard to believe that "I/Me" mistakes are limited to English, but if this is true, I would like to understand why this is.

An analogy to this is word order. In Finnish, which is highly inflected, all of these sentences would be correct and would have the same meaning (with different nuance/emphasis):

• The man ate the chicken
• The chicken ate the man
• Ate the chicken the man
• Ate the man the chicken
• The man the chicken ate
• The chicken the man ate

In the standard language, the word order used should be tailored around the structure of the information being communicated. However, in spoken Finnish people will often say words in the order that thoughts come, which can lead to the use of word orders that would not be the most appropriate in the literary language (but not to the point of being grammatically incorrect). So a Finnish speaker might ask, "Do English speakers make more mistakes with word order than Finnish speakers do given that word order plays a more important role in English than it does in Finnish?"

Of course you as an English speaker know that no English speaker, regardless of education, will accidentally say the chicken ate the man when they really meant to say the man ate the chicken. English speakers use the perfect word order in virtually 100% of instances, and any even slight mistakes immediately give away a person as a foreigner.

This is pretty much exactly equivalent to your question about whether inflected language speakers make more mistakes than English speakers do in cases (no, as it's an integral part of the language).

Also the SE question linked in the comments gives a good example. English speakers understand that Me, Tarzan means the same as I, Tarzan. However, if I say Minut, Tarzan in Finnish (which is the literal translation of Me, Tarzan), it is completely different and I interpret that as a slightly impolite way of saying Tarzan, choose me, even if the sentence is spoken by Tarzan himself. There is just no way to make that sentence mean the same as in English, regardless of how colloquial the register is.

Answer 3

I think they are more common in languages with more cases.

I would say that "I/me" and "who/whom" are different. "I/me" is using a different case than prescribed and "who/whom" is regularizing the objective case of "who" to "who". Let's call the first a "case error" and the second a true "inflection error". Both are not because of a spurious error due to reorganizing the sentence while speaking, but occur regularly by just speaking without thinking about the standard. I'll be concentrating on the "case error".

The case error: Every language is shifting, and if the case a construction requires changes from the standard, we get this kind of mistake. To list some examples from German: The prepositions "trotz" and "wegen" have prescribed genitive, but speakers often use dative, the preposition "dank" has prescribed dative, but speakers often use genitive.

In English, compound objects / subjects are prescribed to have the same case as if it wasn't a compound object (the famous "Would you use 'we' or 'us' here?" test), but speakers use both cases interchangingly.

Often one can find good reasons for such shifts: In case of German, we have basic, everyday prepositions that usually take dative and advanced, formal prepositions that usually take genitive. "trotz" and "wegen" feel basic, and "dank" feels advanced, so to shifts would make the system more regular and logical. In the case of English, a simple rule could be that "me" becomes "I" if it's the subject – a rule that does not need the concept of case.

The reason for my claim that "case errors" are more common in languages with more cases is that you typically have much more constructions where case is important and they can occur. This is also true for "inflection errors" as many of these languages have a lot of irregular inflections that piled up over time. But English has a good deal of those, too: Just look at the list of irregular English verbs and the mentioned changes over time.

Answer 4

Your underlying assumption is wrong. English speakers hardly ever make mistakes with "I/me".

You simply don't encounter sentences like "He gave it to I" or "Him gave it to me".

Now, whether everybody follows a set of arbitrary and ultimately ill-defined rules of fashion that were invented a couple of hundred years ago and have never reflected English as most people speak it, that is a different question.

Joseph Emonds argued in "Grammatically deviant prestige constructions" nearly forty years ago that the "prestige language" that you are talking about is not a possible natural language, precisely because the mechanism of case marking that it relies on no longer exists in English, and so cannot be learnt by children except by external instruction.

While many languages have been regulated by governments (and English has not, in general!) I am not aware of any other cases where the standard so promulgated is so far from anything natural to engender the kind of uncertainty that obtains in English about this "prestige language". So I suspect that the kind of error (of etiquette) that you are referring it is rather rare in other languages.