Re: Order of cases

On Thursday, September 30, 2004, at 11:00 , Christian Thalmann wrote:

> --- 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).
Darn it - I forgot novelties like the "Cambridge Latin Course" when I
wrote my mail about the 'history of the order of cases'. I stopped in the
mid 20th century. After that came the Cambridge course. IIRC the original
version of the course put the cases in the order: NOM, ACC, DAT, GEN, ABL
and called them the A-Form, B-Form, C-Form, D-Form & E-Form. The order was
determined as far as I could see by the order in which they were explained
in the course. The new names were meant to make it 'easier' because it was
thought the traditional names put pupils off.

The trouble with the 'new names' was the B-Form, C-Form etc sound similar
so pupils were inclined to get the idea that the cases were just fancy
variants which didn't really differ much in meaning. There was also the
odd inconvenience that books dealing with German, Russian etc still used
the traditional terms!

The course was eventually revised and the traditional names re-instated.
Also it must have become apparent that in Latin it is more sensible to
keep the Dative & Ablative together, so the order given became NOM, ACC,
DAT, ABL, GEN as Christian gives above. I remember thinking at the time
"Why didn't they stick the GEN back in between the the NOM+ACC and the DAT+
ABL, as it had been for more than half a century in Britain?"

Now whether the shift of the Genitive & Dative (NOM, ACC, GEN, DAT --> NOM,
  ACC, DAT, GEN) tha Paul learnt in German has anything to do with what was
going on in Latin teaching in the UK, or whether it was for some reason
more specifically to do with German, I wouldn't hazard to guess.

> I think the order the canonical choice, since it
> reflects the "coreness" of the cases.
[snip]
> used as a verb argument.  Only a tiny and ever dwindling
> collection of verbs take genitive objects, e.g. "Ich
> entledige mich der Last."
The 'canonical' order until 20th cent was NOM, GEN, DAT, ACC - but your
reasoning may well explain the NOM, ACC, DAT, GEN encountered by Paul.

> When I first heard the expression "Zweiter Fall" for
> accusative, I found it rather stupid, undescriptive and
> misleading.
I agree.

> The more common nomenclature with question
> pronouns makes much more sense: "Wer-Fall", "Wen-Fall"
> etc.
It does. But if one is going encountered other languages with case forms,
it's useful to know the traditional names.
=========================================================
On Friday, October 1, 2004, at 05:27 , Philip Newton wrote:

> On Thu, 30 Sep 2004 10:36:16 -0600, Dirk Elzinga <dirk_elzinga@...>
> wrote:
[snip]
>> 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.
There's no doubt, in fact.

> 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.
Yes, that is the order used by ancient Greek grammarians. The modern
Greeks would certainly be likely to adhere to it.

> I wonder whether Latin borrowed its order from Greek...
They did - and it became the norm for all European languages until the
late 19th century.

> Or, for that
> matter, why Greek used/uses this order, since NOM=ACC there, too, for
> a fair number of nouns.
Only for neuters in _ancient_ Greek - the two cases were always different
in the singular & nearly always so in the plural for masc. & fem.
nouns/adjective/pronouns.

> (On the other hand, knowing the genitive is
> useful for declining some nouns correctly; maybe that's why it comes
> second?)
I think that is almost certainly why the Genitive was placed second. But
why they ordered the others as DAT, ACC, VOC - I don't know and have seen
no satisfactory explanation.

PS: Darn it - I've used my quota of five mails per day & can't send a
welcome Charlie Brickner. Well, if your reading this, Father, I'll just
say "Welcome aboard youngster!"

Ray
===============================================
http://home.freeuk.com/ray.brown
ray.brown@freeuk.com
===============================================
Anything is possible in the fabulous Celtic twilight,
which is not so much a twilight of the gods
as of the reason."      [JRRT, "English and Welsh" ]

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