Re: Order of cases

--- In conlang@yahoogroups.com, Paul Bennett <paul-bennett@N...> wrote:

> The order I learned was Nom, Acc, Dat, Gen, and it's the order I recite
> mentally to this day. I have no idea why that order was chosen.
Same here.  Our grammar range in primary school was
rather limited; I actually learnt a lot of grammatical
terms in Latin class before they were mentioned in
German.  =P

Our Latin order was NOM, ACC, DAT, ABL, GEN, which is
an obvious extension of the German one above (ABL
being closely related to DAT).

I think the order the canonical choice, since it
reflects the "coreness" of the cases.  The simplest of
sentences is the intransitive one, where only the NOM
is needed: "Ich schlafe."  The next step is
transitivity, requiring the ACC: "Ich sehe dich".  Add
one more participant, and you need the DAT: "Ich gebe
es dir."  The GEN, finally, is only marginally "core",
since it is usually built into noun phrases rather than
used as a verb argument.  Only a tiny and ever dwindling
collection of verbs take genitive objects, e.g. "Ich
entledige mich der Last."

When I first heard the expression "Zweiter Fall" for
accusative, I found it rather stupid, undescriptive and
misleading.  The more common nomenclature with question
pronouns makes much more sense: "Wer-Fall", "Wen-Fall"
etc.

I haven't thought about ordering Obrenje's three cases
yet.  Nominative should be first, but what about the
directive and predicative cases?  I'd say they're both
about equally important.



-- Christian Thalmann

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