I have been wondering recently why the cases in inflected languages are written in different orders depending on which language you are studying - even when two or more languages share (at least partly) the same case names.
For example, in German they write “Nominative, Accusative, Genitive, Dative”.
In Russian they write “Nominative, Genitive, Dative, Accusative, Instrumental, Prepositional (or Locative)”
In Latin I believe you write “Nominative, Genitive, Dative, Accusative, Ablative” and where appropriate Vocative afterward.
Does anyone have any idea why? At first I believed that you write the cases out in the order you learn them, but this can’t be true with all languages because I learned the Accusative case long before the Dative had even been mentioned in Russian. Out of interest, how does it work in Ancient Greek, and if anyone knows, Modern Greek? I know nothing about either forms of Greek, so please give the case names in full.
Well, in Ancient Greek it’s “Nominative, Genitive, Dative, Accusative, Vocative”
In Modern Greek we’ve “lost” the Dative so it’s “Nominative, Genitive, Accusative, Vocative”.
Modern Greek obviously follows the pattern of ancient Greek. What grammarian/scholar decided on that order and why I have no idea. It’s obviously not the one you learn first though, since Vocative is the case you use to call/address someone and therefore is one of the first a person learns.
I began studying Old English much before Latin and Greek and became so used to the accusative case being listed right after the nominative case that even today when I write out a memory-list of inflections I follow that order. And when I am looking in a Latin or Greek grammar my eyes often don’t follow the order in which they are listed in the grammar, but they look at the nominative and then take a detour to the accusative and then back up to the genitive. It is strange how persistent little habits are.
Well, strictly speaking, the order of cases belongs to a grammatical tradition rather than to the language itself so I’ve seen different orders for the same language. I know for example that German grammars used to have a traditional Latin-like order, e.g. in the book at http://books.google.de/books?id=pnoKAAAAIAAJ&printsec=frontcover&dq=deutsche+grammatik&as_brr=1#PPA237,M1. Just for fun, I looked through various grammars I have (in English) for different languages and found:
German: Nom. Acc. Dat. Gen.
Russian: Nom. Acc. Gen. Dat. Instr. Prep.
Russian: Nom. Acc. Gen. Dat. Loc. Instr.
(Modern) Greek: Nom. Acc. Gen. Voc.
I guess people have reasons for the orders, but they’re not really clear to me. Like with the traditional order, I don’t really see the logic. I can see why the nominative would come first. At first I thought the genitive is second because of the tradition of identifying the declension class of a noun in terms of its nominative and genitive, but now, since the order goes way back, I wonder if it’s the other way round and the genitive is used for identification because it comes second. Either way, why the order for the rest of the cases?
I know once principle that a lot of modern grammars use (and I think this is the traditional one in Sanskrit) is to order them so that cases that have the same (or similar) form in certain declensions are placed together. This isn’t always possible, though, e.g. with German, the dative is usually the same as the nom. and acc. in the singular but in the plural the genitive is. I find this kind of order more useful as a learner but I’m not quite sure it actually is more useful.
Thanks for your opinions. Essorant, I have a similar habit to you in that respect. Despite the tradition for the Russian accusative case to be listed fourth, I tend to follow the accepted German order as far as is possible even for Russian, as I began to learn German about six years before I started Russian. I am trying to get used to the accepted order of the Latin cases, though. I’m not quite sure why this is - mainly to keep with tradition, I suspect.
Perhaps the reason does indeed have something to do with the case’s function from a grammatical point of view. Noun declinations in Latin are based on their nominative and genitive forms (thank you, modus.irrealis), as is the case in Russian - the nominative is considered the base form of the noun and the genitive singular is used to determine the position of word stress - German does not share this feature, though, as word stress in German (at least to an English speaker) is very predictable. As the other oblique cases do not serve any further grammatical purpose beyond their normal functions as direct and prepositional objects, their positions in declination tables in relation to each other do not have such a rigid pattern.
That’s my idea, anyway. What are the orders in other languages, for example, Sanskrit? I would imagine that languages related to Russian, such as Ukranian, would have the same order as the Russian cases. Perhaps the tradition of order is unique to each language family - the Germanic languages having one order, the Indo-European group having another and the Indo-Aryan languages having yet another?
Ioqu, do you think that the reason that the Nominative and Vocative in your case are written next to each other is because their forms are generally the same? Or did you learn them that way because that was how you wanted to learn them?
In Denmark, we usually order our cases thus for Latin and Greek: Nominative, vocative, accusative, genitive, dative, ablative. When dealing with Old Norse, however, the order usually is nominative, accusative, dative, genitive.
As for the Sanskrit, the Hindu grammarians order the cases like this prathamā (nom), dvitīyā (acc), tṛtīyā (inst), caturhī (dat), pañcamī (abl), ṣaṣṭhī (gen), saptamī (loc). As you can see, the Sanskrit cases are called by number. Also, they don’t consider the vocative a real case. That is also the order followed in Macdonell’s Sanskrit Grammar.
@Jacobus
The Germanic languages are a part of the Indo-European languages.
The more points of view that seem to be collected in one place, the more I think that actually, the order of the cases is ultimately down to personal preference - unless it is actually down to the country in which you learn the language… which will undoubtedly be disproved in the next post
I don’t know why, but I always seem to forget that. I briefly thought the order may be down to subgroups within language families, but maybe that’s not right, either. Thanks, NuclearWarhead
Thank you, Ioqu. I do not know the case endings well enough to be able to comment on the similarities between the other oblique cases, although I know the nominative and vocative are generally the same, and the accusative generally doesn’t change very much in any language, so that may be why the nominative and accusative are sometimes grouped together. Perhaps, in terms of practicality, it is easier when similar cases are grouped together because then learners are able to see their similarities far easier than if two relatively similar cases were spread out. Just a thought.
Bert, that’s the same way the cases are normally written out in German grammars, too. In German, the nominative and accusative are alike, and the dative and the genitive are alike. Is the same true in Greek? That may also account for why in German, it’s fairly common for them to either be listed “Nominative, Accusative, Genitive, Dative” or “Nominative, Accusative, Dative, Genitive” - the subject must logically come first, so the first two are fixed, and the genitive and dative have no especially specific grammatical function, and so are listed interchangeably in terms of order. Starting to see some patterns, finally. Thanks guys
The grammars I have that are written in German generally have the same order as the English - nominative-genitive-dative-accusative-ablative - both Rubenbauer-Hofman (Latin grammar) and a German grammar, apparently based on the order proponed by ancient grammarians, e.g. Donatus.
I once heard that it was Madvig (who, in the nineteenth century made some of the best Latin grammars as well as Greek) that ‘invented’ the nominative-accusative-genitive-dative-ablative order, based on similarity of morfology and the different syntactic uses (accusative comes naturally after nominative since accusative denotes the direct object, etc.), but that might be a telltale, since we Danes have a tendency of making ourselves seem just a tad more progressive than we might actually happen to be.
I prefer the latter, probably because that order is what I learned language looking at.
For fun, I might add that the Hellenistic Grammarian Dionysios Thrax used the following order and terms: “πτώσεις ὀνομάτων εἰσὶ πέντε· ὀρθή, γενική, δοτική, αἰτιατική, κλητική.” (There are five cases: nominative, genitive, dative, accusative, vocative).
Incidentally, does anyone know what traditional ways of RECITING the cases for different languages? I personally started teaching myself Latin with the singular followed by the plural of each case but various materials indicate that the traditional order is to recite all the singulars then the plurals. I still prefer my own way, but is this the norm for other languages like Sanskrit?
I also read in a Sanskrit textbook that the traditional way of reciting Sanskrit verb conjugations was to start from the third person, I don’t remember if they said to follow with the dual and plural of each person or they recited all the singulars of each person though.
I have absolutely no idea at all about Sanskrit. In Russian, though, our lecturers tend to recite all the singulars and then the plurals. I assume that system would apply for languages like Latin and Greek, too, but I don’t know really. German does not decline its nouns, but rather the articles and pronouns that are attached to the nouns. My teachers never really recited the declinations, but I would imagine that they would go through it one case at a time. But I think German is largely irrelevant for your question. I’ll let someone else answer for your specific question on Sanskrit, as I’d be guessing
Though not cases, in my Hebrew class, we conjugate verbs started with the 3 masculine singular going to the 1st common singular then jump over to the plural 3rd person down to the 1st common plural. It really threw me off for a while after having Greek paradigms drilled in my head. But I also remember doing the Nom, Acc, Gen, Dat in German class in High School then coming to college and being slightly thrown off by the Greek Nom, Gen, Dat, Acc.
Hello
I also was wondering why were the cases orderd so
we study in my college as
nom ., voc ., acc ., dat ., abl .
many books mention them in a different way as you said
nom ., gen., dat., acc., abl .
I was wondering why had they put dat. before the acc. although I feel that mentioning the dat before the abl., is easier to remember ..
by the way .. I find them easier in another order .. which is
nom., gen ., acc ., dat . abl ., and then voc.,
this’s easier to me because even when I study Modern Greek I find it nom ., gen ., acc
so I think this’s the best order at least for me .. lol ^^ but I hope that it helps me
Anyway .. we use the order just to make memorizing easier but when you deal with texts it will not mean so much if you memorize abl. before or after dat .. all which will be important to remember that this ending belongs to the acc. or nom., etc ..
^^
I don’t trust people who use PC’s instead of Macs, people who hate cats, people who watch the show Friends, and of course people who prefer any declension order other than N-G-D-Acc-Abl-Voc.
