Re: Language universal?

At 12:59 am -0500 8/2/01, Nik Taylor wrote:
>Raymond Brown wrote:
>> and to treat the vocative like the
>> locative, i.e. vestigial case forms retained for a small set of nouns.
>
>Except, wasn't the vocative used for *all* masculine 2nd declension
>nouns?
No.

There is no separate vocative forms for 2nd decl. masc. whose nominatives
end in -(e)r

Few nouns ending in -us have a separate marked vocative except nouns that
specifically refer to people, gods etc.

Even in the latter group we find the nominative being used by some instead
of the vocative from the Imperial period, at least.  This becomes more
marked in later Latin, e.g.

Deus meus, Deus meus, ut quid dereliquisti me?
My God, my God, why have you foresaken me?    [Matt. 27, 46]

The Greek has: Thee mou, Thee mou....... with the vocative endings and,
despite what some grammar books say, Dee was found in Latin. OK, you say,
'Dee' is awkward, that's why they used 'Deus'.

Maybe, but it hardly explains why 'meus' was used instead of the strictly
Classical _mi_.  And there's nothing awkward about _agne_, yet we find:
Agnus Dei,         qui   tollis    peccata    mundi,
Lamb of-God, [you] whho take-away the-sins of-the-world,

 miserere  nobis.
have-mercy on-us.

Ah, but that's Christian Latin, I hear some say (as tho when the Romans
adopted Christianity it somehow corrupted their pagan Latin language!).  OK
- Pliny was no Christian , but he writes:
salue, primus omnium...   "hail, you who are foremost of all......"

The grammar book vocative is 'prime'.

And this use of nominative instead of vocative is found even earlier in poetry.

It was just about hanging on for a relatively small set of singular nouns,
being kept on the life support machine by grammarians - pretty vestigial
IMO.

Ray.

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A mind which thinks at its own expense
will always interfere with language.
                   [J.G. Hamann 1760]
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