Re: Order of cases

Quoting Philip Newton <philip.newton@...>:

> On Thu, 30 Sep 2004 16:19:20 +0200, Henrik Theiling <theiling@...>
> wrote:
> >        m.sg.  n.sg.  f.sg.  pl.
> >   NOM  der    das    die    die
> >   ACC  den    das    die    die
> >   DAT  dem    dem    der    den
> >   GEN  des    des    der    der
>
> Why do you use this particular order?
>
> Standard German order (as much as it has one) is NOM-GEN-DAT-ACC. This
> is so common that some even use e.g. "dritter Fall" (third case) for
> "Dativ", etc. (Interesting snippet: IIRC, "case" in this sense comes
> from Latin "cadere" 'to fall', from the idea that the oblique cases
> "fall" away from the nominative; the German "Fall" is, I presume, a
> straight translation of this.)
>
> When I saw a book in English for English people learning German, I
> remember being surprised that it had NOM-ACC-(don't remember the order
> of the other two).
FWIW, NADG is the only order I've seen in my Swedish German textbooks. I've seen
both NADG and NGDA in German German (!) ones.

> Is it because NOM=ACC for three of the four cases? Or some sort of
> "core" vs "oblique" thing? (Is "core" the right word I'm looking for
> here?)
Both, perhaps. Separating the nom and acc when they're mostly identical always
seemed a bit perverse to me.

> ObConlang: if your conlang uses IE-oid cases, in which order do you
> typically list them?
For the Klaishic languages, I use NOM-ACC-DAT-GEN-INST, minus the cases that
that particular language doesn't use. For Kalini Sapak I guess I use
NOM-ACC-GEN, altho supposedly the Kalana themselves use the accusative as the
quotation form.

                                                         Andreas