Re: Order of cases

On Thu, 30 Sep 2004 10:36:16 -0600, Dirk Elzinga <dirk_elzinga@...> wrote:
> One more thing. After I posted on the presentation order of case in the
> Old germanic grammars I have available to me, I looked in some Latin
> textbooks, and the order there is the same as the German order (NOM GEN
> DAT ACC ABL), so maybe the German grammatical tradition borrowed the
> order of cases from Latin.
Quite possibly.

And the grammar of Modern Greek in Greek that I have uses the order
NOM GEN ACC VOC, and a grammar of Ancient Greek in for Greek
schoolchildren (written in Modern Greek) uses NOM GEN DAT ACC VOC -
again, the same as Latin and German (the way I know it), modulo
missing cases.

I wonder whether Latin borrowed its order from Greek... Or, for that
matter, why Greek used/uses this order, since NOM=ACC there, too, for
a fair number of nouns. (On the other hand, knowing the genitive is
useful for declining some nouns correctly; maybe that's why it comes
second?)

Cheers,
--
Philip Newton <philip.newton@...>
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