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[Ruediger Landmann]

David Nalley wrote:
> I may be showing my ignorance here.....but  I thought that since
> Fedora is a trademark, and a proper name that it was always Fedora.
> Much as I am always David regardless of what country I may be in or
> language I may be speaking.
>   
Short answer: No

A longer and more complete answer:

Inflected languages inflect proper nouns as well (including trademarks). 
It's worth keeping in mind that these inflections are not just something 
"tacked onto" the noun; they represents a fundamentally different way of 
structuring the language from the way that Modern English does it. 
They're an essential part of how these languages work, which is 
counter-intuitive for English speakers.

To stick with the previous example, if people were talking about you in 
Czech:

Subject in a sentence: David

Possessive: Davida
"David's book" -> "Kniha Davida"

Direct object in a sentence: Davida

Indirect object of a sentence: Davidovi

Vocative: Davide
"Hey David!" -> "Ahoj Davide!"

I'm on shaky ground here with the specifics, so I'll leave it at that. 
Note that English has a tiny remnant of this as well; your name changes 
from "David" to "David's" to indicate possession. [1]

To give you an idea of the range of languages for which this is an 
issue, they include, just in Europe, all the Slavic languages (eg. 
Russian, Czech, Polish, Serbian, Croatian and many many more) the 
Finno-Ugaric languages (Finnish, Hungarian, Estonian and others – these 
have a /highly/ complex case system), as well as Turkish, Greek, and 
Armenian.

Note that so far, I've only discussed the way that grammatical case can 
change nouns, but languages change nouns for other reasons too, such as 
to affix or suffix articles onto them.

Cheers
Rudi



[1] Old English (Anglo-Saxon) also had a system of inflected endings for 
nouns, but with only four cases, rather than Czech's seven and 
Hungarian's seventeen. The possessive singular ending for masculine 
nouns in Anglo-Saxon was "es" (so "David's book" -> "Davides boke"). 
This carried over into Middle English for almost all nouns, regardless 
of grammatical gender or number. Modern English retains an apostrophe to 
show where an "e" has been left out for the past 600 years or so, in 
precisely the same way that the apostrophe in "don't" shows where an "o" 
has been left out.