Re: cases

On Mon, 11 Sep 2000, Thomas R. Wier wrote:

>Nik wrote:
>
>> "Thomas R. Wier" wrote:
>> > That would make them "core" and "oblique" cases, respectively.
>>
>> But those aren't the terms traditionally used.  They're called
>> Nominative/Accusative and Genitive/Dative.  There's also a Vocative case
>> which is usually the same as nominative/accusative, but does differ for
>> some nouns.
>
>Calling the Romanian cases "nominative/accusative" and
>"genitive/dative"  is about like calling English's cases
>"nominative/vocative" and
>"accusative/dative/ablative/instrumental/locative" just because Latin
>happened to use those names for those functions.
Why? At least Romanian is a Latin derived tongue. I'd call our cases
nominative, genitive and dative/accusative.

>The names of the cases in a given language ought to be given
>according to the function of the cases in that language, and not just
>because some other language happened to have cases which overlap with
>those of the language in question.  Remember:  every language's case
>system is unique, and so the labels we apply to them are fairly
>arbitrary.
On the other hand, it is pretty damned handy to have names that are
similar across several language (families). It's just a matter of
learning how they all use their cases.

Padraic.

>
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>Tom Wier   |     "Cogito ergo sum, sed credo ergo ero."
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