I’m a student of Latin, and I have decided to do some study of Anglo-Saxon for fun and diversion. I notice there is a case called the instrumental case in Anglo-Saxon. I found a reference to it on the web that states, “the instrumental case indicates that a noun is the instrument or means by which the subject achieves or accomplishes an action.”
Okay…isn’t this basically what the ablative case does? If so, why the distinction between the two cases? Is there some fine element of definition that separates the two? I think I’m missing something but don’t know what.
Thanks in advance for any answers, and moderator feel free to move this if you think it would be better placed elsewhere in the forum.
Latin and Greek originally had the instrumental, as well as locative, ablative, and the rest. Ablative shows motion away from, whereas instrumental shows means (or “instrument”); the Latin ablative simply absorbed the function of the instrumental. When naming the Anglo-Saxon cases, it makes more sense to go by the inherent meaning than their correspondence to Latin cases. In Greek, as I understand, the dative absorbed most instrumental functions, so if you named the Anglo-Saxon instrumental after the Latin ablative, then the Hellenists might be jealous.
One reason why I am not as fond of Greek is that I don’t know how on earth you can use a dative case to express instrument. But then I accept Tacitus’ dative of agent with open chuckling arms.
The Greek dative case is basically the instrumental case, as it replaced ablative and locative and took over their functions. The same thing for ablative with the locative case and instrumental case, and so on. Every language does this, It’s not so peculiar.
In my opinion, explaining that the ablative case absorbs the instrumental or the locative is not very exact. In Latin language the ideas of instrument (instrumental case), place (locative case) and ablative (origin, point from the action starts) were unified with the same casual ending. This phenomenon is called “synchretismus”. They didn’t have one ending each, but only one and the same for the three. But the ideas they express are different, although in Latin they use the same endings. On the other hand, the Greek language hasn’t ablative case, and the concepts that in Latin are expressed with the ablative are divided between other cases in Greek. So, the locative and the instrumental are confused with the dative case (that expresses who receives the benefit from the verbal action); and the ablative (origin) is expressed by the genitive case.