Re: Def. of Case WAS: Cases, again

Matthew Kehrt wrote:

> This leaves me somewhat confused as to the definition of "case".  In
> English, we have words that take semantic roles based on word order, such
> as direct and indirect objects and subjects.  Other, more inflectional
> languages mark these semantic roles with actual changes to the words
> taking these roles.  Which is the case, this specific set of marked words,
> or the semantic role?
I think of "case" forms as having some specific marking, where the different
forms can be arranged into some sort of paradigm-- à la Latin/Greek/Sanskrit
e.g.-- and even though some of the forms may be identical, it will still be
possible to know which "case" they are by usage.  This is true of many noun
forms in German; also of Latin dat/abl. plurals, or o-decl. -i 'gen. sg.'
= -i 'nom. pl.'.

There is a now outmoded method of teaching/explaining Engl and other langs.,
where nouns were arranged in a neat little paradigm just like Latin, even
though there was no change from one case to another.  This accounts for the
old-fashioned parsing of "I hit the man" as showing "man" as both direct
object and accusative.  The only excuse for calling it accusative is by
analogy with pronouns, where in "I hit him" there is definitely an
"accusative" form.

We have the same problem in Kash, where only animate nouns have a marked
accusative; with inanimate nouns the base (nom.) and the accusative are the
same

My mother's old college Engl. grammar (1920s) had such stuff:
Nom. man
Acc. man
Gen. (of the) man
Dat. (to the) man
Ablative (many preps....) man
and don't forget the Vocative:  O man!

Or the really early Western grammars of Malay--
Nom. orang
Acc. orang
Gen. orang
Dat. (kepada) orang
Abl. (dari) orang

I'd imagine that early grammars of Japanese used the same
system.............sometimes the results are quite hilariously off-base.