Talkin' seven cases;
Learnin' Latin's loony; who
Has left us cases traces?
Not the Latin-lingos crew.
German puts you through the paces--
It's like Latin, minus two.

If you wanna do the Deutsch,
Then you'd better buckle down,
Be a rah-rah student.
If you rest, you're gonna frown,
At best; at worst, drives you crazy.
I said "Latin minus two"?

Bad at Latin, German, math too--
Make that, make that, yeah, "minus three."
Four cases in that crazy
Language where "you" is "Sie" and "du,"
Also "ihr";* just like Twain said:

"Awful language"; syntax--whew!

First you got the nominative
Then accusative. ("J'accuse,"
Said a Frenchmen in case Dreyfus**
[Meaning "three feet" in four-case fuss]
Only one case did he use.)
Finally, genitive and dative.
Lingo's Latin, less a few.


*In fairness to German, Castilian Spanish has tú, usted, vosotros, and ustedes.

**Emil Zola (1840-1902) risked his career and even his life on January 13, 1898, when his "J'accuse" was published on the front page of the Paris daily, L'Aurore. "J'accuse" accused the French government of anti-Semitism and of wrongfully placing Jewish army captain Alfred Dreyfus in jail. Zola declared that the conviction and transportation of Dreyfus to Devil's Island came after a false accusation of espionage and a miscarriage of justice. Zola was tried for libel on February 7, 1898, and was convicted on February 23. The case (so to speak) was known as the Dreyfus affair. The name Dreyfus is a variant on the German Drei Fuesse, "three feet." Mark Twain's essay "The Awful German Language" takes the contorted tongue to task.