Well done, thou good and faithful servant.
The above phrase is in what's called the vocative case, which was used in most Indo-Euorpean languages when addressing people (or animals) directly. In this case, the speaker is addressing someone called "good and faithful servant," but it could be almost anyone: Well done, Mom! Well done, Sam! Well done, Son!
Leave out the comma, and you're talking about cooking Mom, or Sam, or one's son, which is not "done" in civilised societies.
Historically, in English, most of the ancient indicators of the vocative case have disappeared, except for a few relics like the vocative O:
| O Romeo, Romeo! wherefore art thou Romeo? |
| O ye of little faith. |
Mostly though, we use a comma, which represents an actual pause when we speak aloud, but is conspicuously absent in the two examples of the vocative "O". The comma represents and actual change in the rhyth, -- and in many cases the pitch -- of uur voices when we speak aloud, which is one of the reasons that it's a very good idea to read your words aloud when you're writing dialogue.
If you misspell the above sentences with "Oh," a type of exclamation, usually, you change not only the sense of the sentences but the mandatory punctuation:
| Oh, Romeo, Romeo! Bird thou never wert! |
| Oh, ye of little faith. |
This is something of a fine point, and unusual, since the vocative O is rarely seen these days, except for purposes of humour or deliberate archaism:
| What's up, O Romeo? |
| Oh, Romeo, Romeo! What's up, O handsome dude? |
| O, ye of little faith, you don't seem to have believed me when I said that the show always starts at eight. |
If you really listen to the way people speak, you can hear either the comma, a slight pause, or a distinctive raising and lowering of pitch when we speak people's names or appellations.
Well done, Mom.
-- ^^ --
How do you do, Bob?
-- -- -- ^^ --
You could almost as easily punctuate the above sentence: How do you do? Bob.
This looks slightly odd only because we're used to seeing the question mark at the end of the sentence, but the actual question is asked by the first three words. "Bob" is a vocative naming of the person being addressed, which is quite clear when you change the words a bit: How do you cook Bob?
| Fred to Jack: Do you know Mike? |
| Jack to Fred: I do, Fred. |
| Fred to Jack: I don't know Mike. |
| Jack to Fred: Do you know Steve, Fred? |
Note too that the vocative comma surrounds the name or other description of the person being addressed, if necessary.
| Jack to Fred: | Fred, do you know Steve? |
| Jack to Fred: | Do you, Fred, know Steve? |
| Fred to Jack: | I don't know Steve. |
| I don't know Steve, Jack. | |
| I don't know, Jack. | |
| No, Jack. | |
| Jack, I don't know Steve. | |
| Jack, watch out for the bull, you fool! |
Leave out those pauses, or those commas, and you invite ambiguity and confusion.
| Fred: | Do you know Jack? (Who is Fred talking to?) |
| Fred: | Do you know Steve Jack? (Is Fred talking about Steve Jack?) |
| Fred: | We lost Jack. (Is Jack lost? Or have Jack and Fred both lost?) |
| Fred: | Jack watch out for the bull you fool! (Is there a "Jack watch?" Does it have to worry only about bulls you fooled?) |
Comments
A useful reminder
all I have to do now is remember. Thanks, Puddintane.
Angharad
Punctuation can totally restructure sentences.
Let's eat, Grandma!
Let's eat Grandma!
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What's the difference between a Panda and a Rapist?
A Panda eats shoots and leaves.
A Rapist eats, shoots, and leaves.
Cases
I think you're referring to cases, rather than commas.
http://www.tutorpal.com/Our_English/old_english/cip.html
Nominative, Dative, Genitive, and Accusative.
I'll get a life when it's proven and substantiated to be better than what I'm currently experiencing.
Cases
There is no real vocative case in English, and hasn't been since it became English.
One can find mentions of the vocative case, as if it were real, but these typically describe it inconsistently to other descriptions, so we see it described as a variation of the "Nominative," "Subjective," or other true cases familiar to scholars of Latin or Greek (usually).
Example 1: The vocative case is one of the four main cases in modern English. The vocative case is used to indicate direct address (i.e., talking to somebody directly). Names in the vocative case are offset using commas. Nouns and pronouns in the vocative case are identical to those in subjective case. However, they should be offset using comma(s). This is why the vocative case is distinguished as a case.
Example 2: Modern English lacks a formal (morphological) vocative case. English commonly uses the nominative case for vocative expressions, but sets them off from the rest of the sentences with pauses as interjections (rendered in writing as commas).
We observe that there's no actual inflection involved (except in the limited case of pronouns, and most of those distinctions are null), but only indications of what actually happens in spoken English, that we pause slightly when identifying the people we're talking to, perhaps a sign of respect, or perhaps a simple acknowledgement of the special relationship that exists between speakers and listeners. To crib from the Seder, "Why is this person different from all other persons?"
In almost all cases, the current English usage is described by analogy with one or another language which does have cases. So we see tendentious arguments that usually start with some variation of, "When in Latin they say XXX, it is in the ablative case, therefore the English ablative case is... YYY."
The fact is that English is almost completely "isolating," like Chinese, and uses various particles, or even elaborate phrases, to describe situations in which Latin speakers would simply inflect one word or another to indicate true grammatical roles.
Since Classical scholars typically think that both Latin and Greek are better than English, and much better than Chinese, of which they're typically ignorant, they do love to use twisted Latin- and Greek-identified descriptions of what it is that we actually do, which perfectly explains why many English-speakers become confused when people tell them that they're using this "case" or that.
It's true that English does have a few quaint relics of our case-burdened history as we developed from Proto-Indo-European through several variations in three main streams (German, Norse, and slightly French), but these are either the plural (which is pretty darned simple, usually, except for "oxen" and a few other relics currently being abandoned by almost everyone with any sense of the tide of history, since "oxes" makes perfect sense to almost everyone, and no one says "shoon" any more) or some quirky inflection of a pronoun.
We note that our collective abandonment of case has gone far enough that the distinction between it's (the contraction of "it is") and its (the possessive) is one of the most common errors that people make in casual writing.
Vive l'anarchie!
-
Cheers,
Puddin'
A tender heart is an asset to an editor: it helps us be ruthless in a tactful way.
--- The Chicago Manual of Style
OK, how do you punctuate this sentance
Woman without her man is wild
Hugs
Patricia
Happiness is being all dressed up and HAVING some place to go.
Semper in femineo gerunt
Ich bin eine Mann
Had this in Creative Writing
Had this sentence in a Creative Writing class a few years ago.
But the sentence we were given was "Woman without her man is nothing.
I'll try to answer your question and verse this way:
Woman, without her man, is wild. or Woman: Without her man, is wild.
There may be other versions out there, just depends on the use of punctuation.
May everyone have a Happy New Year,
Bill Durr (Builder55)
well ...
Both have the same meaning, as I read them. For a different meaning:
Woman: without her, man is wild.
*shrug*
None of them relate to vocative.
Amy!
Anyway you like...
Woman, without her… man… is wild.
Woman, without her, man is wild.
Woman without her man is wild.
Woman without. Her man is wild.
Woman…. Without her, man is wild.
Woman without her man is… wild.
Woman. Without her, man is. Wild!
Punctuation is only a rough indication of how people actually speak, and people are quite creative in their use of language, our first and most precious performing art.
Given a (theoretical) choice, by far the majority of human beings would choose blindness over being deaf, which is worth thinking about. The selection of one (theoretical) alternative or another is usually very rapid.
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Cheers,
Puddin'
A tender heart is an asset to an editor: it helps us be ruthless in a tactful way.
--- The Chicago Manual of Style
Rarely Seen?
There is a case it's seen quite a bit. I'm a little sad it didn't make it into your examples: "O Canada." We sing it every day from kindergarten through grade 12. :P
Seriously though, these are great examples. Proper punctuation is key to an easily read story. If the reader gets confused by grammar then they're more likely to ignore your story from sheer frustration.
The distinction between...
Oh, Canada, and O Canada is rather difficult for many people, and in fact the anthems of both the USA and Canada begin with the exact same sound. Coincidence? Perhaps not. Back in the days of Middle English (when spelling was often a matter of personal choice) O and Oh were used interchangeably, and some people argue that the vocative "O" actually originated in the interjection, Oh! We hear a possible precursor to the vocative O all the time, in fact:
Oh! Fred! Did I tell you about the comet that's going to destroy the Earth in seventeen minutes?
Okay, so we don't hear that particular sentence every day….
None-the-less, almost every interjection implies a listener (who may be absent or undefined) but especially "Oh!" because they are typically bids for attention.
Damn! Fred! Did I tell you about the comet that's going to destroy the Earth in seventeen minutes?
Is that the beginnings of a "vocative damn?"
I dare say that the "O ye of little faith…" quote is fairly familiar to many Christians, but that doesn't make it any the less archaic. We often use archaic forms in English to imply a certain solemnity:
Well done, thou good and faithful servant….
Perhaps that's a vocative "thou…."
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Cheers,
Puddin'
A tender heart is an asset to an editor: it helps us be ruthless in a tactful way.
--- The Chicago Manual of Style
Gee, and here I thought it
Gee, and here I thought it was Irish.
You know, O' Canada.
I'll get a life when it's proven and substantiated to be better than what I'm currently experiencing.
Oxford Comma
This is excellent. I always enjoy some discussion of the peculiarities of English.
For your next trick, would you care to give us your views on the Oxford Comma? :)
not as think as i smart i am