Re: Order of cases

On Fri, 1 Oct 2004 07:00:24 +0100, Ray Brown <ray.brown@...> wrote:
> (c) The vocative hardly survived as a distinct case in Latin - unlike
> Greek where vocative singulars were often different from the nominative.
> It differed only in 2nd decl. masculines ending in -us, otherwise the
> Romans just the nominative.
Eh, I'm not sure whether the vocative is that much more important in Greek.

There, too, it's separate especially in the 2nd decl. masculines
ending in -os, and also in 1st decl. masculines in -as or -ês (but
those are not that common, I'd say), as well as in some 3rd declension
nouns. But I believe that in many cases, it was identical to the
nominative.

Still, I have a soft spot for the vocative case and am always pleased
to discover that this or that language has a vocative (most recently,
Polish). One of the proto-proto-conlangs brewing in my head will
definitely have a vocative case.

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