Advanced Grammar Topics: Grammatical Cases Part 1

Written by Blackkdark on 26th June 2007

In the world of languages we find other interesting topics in Grammar that don't exist in English. One of such is Grammatical Case or sometimes refered to as Declensions (there is a slight difference but not that big). The interesting thing is that Old English, that is, Anglo-Saxon used to have a system of declensions. Declensions apply to nouns, pronoun, and adjectives. Some languages, like English, use word order to replace any use for nouns declensions. Some language don't need a word order because of the declension system. Others, such as German, use a mixture of word order with a declension system.

The point of grammatical case is to show the fact that a word is or agrees with the subject, direct object, indirect object, possessing object, etc. In some languages, these replace prepositions as we know them in English. Languages like Latin and Russian which are heavily declined, have more freedom in word order. In English, we rely on word order to tell us what the objects and subjects of the sentence are. Although we do change our pronouns from a subjective to an objective form (e.g. I to me, He to him, We to us, etc). This is also how it survived in Spanish, French, Portuguese, Dutch, Norwegian, etc. The possessive Genetive form also still exists in English (-'s) and Norwegian (-s).

In Latin there are 7 different cases, although the vocative and locative are often considered one. Russian has 6, Finnish has 15 (or so I've heard diffferent numbers), Hungarian and Turkish have around 20, Romanian has about 6, Greek has 3, and German has 4. Other languages have them as well, including Irish, Anglo-Saxon, Estonian, Polish, and Moldovan, this is just some of the bigger ones from the Indo-European family. Although these languages have freedoms in their word order, most still have patterns such as Latin usually putting verbs at the end of sentences or such.

To illustrate how grammatical cases work, take this sentence in Latin:
Marcus Davum ferit. Davum Marcus ferit.
Ferit Marcus Davum. Ferit Davum Marcus.
Marcus ferit Davum. Davum ferit Marcus. = Mark hits David.
We can see the freedom in the word order here. since we see 6 word orders in Latin for the 1 simple word order in English. The first two would be the most common, except in Poetry.

To show the differences we use the sentence before:
Marcus Davum ferit. = Mark hits David.
Marcum Davus ferit. = David hits Mark.
Here we see that a little change in the endings or Morphology can change the entire meaning of the sentence.

Grammatical case becomes more and more complicated the more cases you have. You have to memorized them usually as they come and sometimes they get worse with different Genders of Nouns and Adjectives. Adjectives often have to change as well to match not only the gender but often the declension as well.