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Re: Order of cases

From:Philip Newton <philip.newton@...>
Date:Friday, October 1, 2004, 6:29
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@...> Watch the Reply-To!