Re: Order of cases

On Thursday, September 30, 2004, at 05:45 , John Cowan wrote:

> 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:
All true - as is usually the case with John  :)

The older order: NOM, GEN, DAT, ACC, VOC(ATIVE) is due them the ancient
Greeks. Why they did it that way, I don't suppose anyone knows. The Romans
took it over and stuck their ablative after the vocative.

Presumably Alice must have seen something like I have in an early 19th
cent "A Catechism of Latin Grammar" in a series known as "Whittaker's
Improved Editions of Pinnock's Carechisms" (I kid you not):
Nom. mensa _a table_
Gen. mensæ _of a table_
Dat. mensæ _to a table_
Acc. mensam _a table_
Voc. mensa _O table!_
Abl. mensā _from a table_
   (Hope most of you see the a-e ligatures & a-macron OK)

Of course, having such great authority as the Greek & Roman grammarians,
other European languages continued the tradition.

But it was unthinking of the Romans just to adopt the Greek order, for
these reasons:
(a) The Dative & Ablative plurals were _never_ distinguished in the plural
for either nouns, adjectives or pronouns and, for many nouns & adjectives
the two cases were the same in the singular.
(b) For the majority of nouns & adjectives the nominative & accusative
plurals were the same (at least after the Augustan period), as well as
always being the same in the singular for all neuter nouns, adjectives &
pronouns.
(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. It was a vestigial case, just like the
locative which the Romans did not include in the formal listing.

Considerations (a) and (b) led to scholars in the UK adopting a different
order sometime before the end of the 19th century, namely: NOM, VOC, ACC,
GEN, DAT, ABL.
(Note VOC put next to the NOM because it was usually the same)

I have a book printed in 1908 which uses that order & it is the order that
I was taught in the 1950s. Since that time, i notice that the vocative has
tended to be dropped from the formal list and treated - right IMO - like
the locative.

This order was adopted in the UK when setting out declension paradigms in
other languages as well.

Certainly German cases were given in the order NOM, GEN, DAT, ACC as we
can see with Schleyer's design for Volapük:
Nom. vol _world_
Gen. vola _of the world_
Dat. _vole_ _to the world_
Abl. _voli_ _world_

And I think German grammars still used this order until well into the 20th
century. Possibly German influence that kept the older order being
retained in the US.

But sometime during the last century, German grammars adopted the NOM, ACC,
  GEN, DAT ordering; and it really does make more sense in German to keep
the Nom. & Acc. together.

So there you are. It's all convention anyway (I recall a debate with some
guy who tried to make out that the older method was the 'natural' method
and that we Brits, who don't understand cases, had adopted an unnatural
method    :)

Ray
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http://home.freeuk.com/ray.brown
ray.brown@freeuk.com
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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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