Re: Order of cases

Philip Newton scripsit:

> Standard German order (as much as it has one) is NOM-GEN-DAT-ACC.
Here in the U.S. I studied both German and Latin using this case order
(with ablative at the end for Latin).  Nom-acc order seems to be commoner
in the U.K. for Latin grammars, and perhaps it's spread to grammars of
German as well.  This hasn't always been true even in the U.K., however,
as the following passage from _Alice in Wonderland_ shows:

	Alice thought this must be the right way of speaking to a mouse:
	she had never done such a thing before, but she remembered having
	seen in her brother's Latin Grammar, `A mouse--of a mouse--to
	a mouse--a mouse--O mouse!'

In the Zimmermann translation this very reasonably becomes
"Eine Maus -; einer Maus -; einer Maus -; eine Maus -; o Maus!"
Note the missing ablative in both versions.

> (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.)
"Accusative" has an interesting etymology: the latin "accusativus"
is a mistranslation of "indicating the Greek term "aitiatikh", meaning
"the thing caused [by the action of the verb]), due to the fact that
"aitia" can mean "cause" or "accuse".

> ObConlang: if your conlang uses IE-oid cases, in which order do you
> typically list them?
I would always tend to use nom-gen-dat-acc unless there were some
compelling reason not to.
> Cheers,
> --
> Philip Newton <philip.newton@...>
> Watch the Reply-To!
--
John Cowan  jcowan@reutershealth.com  www.reutershealth.com  www.ccil.org/~cowan
No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the
continent, a part of the main.  If a clod be washed away by the sea,
Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a
manor of thy friends or of thine own were: any man's death diminishes me,
because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for
whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.  --John Donne

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