Talk:List of grammatical cases

Finno-Ugric

What if we made a sublist with the cases that only occur in Finno-Ugric languages?

Perhaps we should make the "example languages" more comprehensive and include all known languages that distinguish that particular case. Kwertii 16:16, 18 Mar 2004 (UTC)

name change

I renamed this article "List of language cases" because "List of cases" is not specific enough. For example, "List of cases" could refer to legal cases. Kingturtle 22:02, 16 May 2004 (UTC)

Thanks for your consideration, but the new title doesn't make any sense. I'll move it to List of grammatical cases. — Timwi 21:36, 12 Jun 2004 (UTC)

dedative case?

Concerning the "dedative case" - is there such a thing? What is the point of having a case with no example languages given? Vice 11:53, 12 Sep 2004 (UTC)

postpositional case

The postpositional case and oblique case are the same - and usually referred to only as the oblique case Bish

Constructed languages

Is there really a point to mark constructed languages as such? I see no point in distinguishing them apart except to belittle their existance as languages. (Yes, I speak a constructed language, and yes, I am offended.) D. Wo. 08:17, Jan 22, 2005 (UTC)

I see no problem with including the most well-known conlangs, especially Esperanto, Quenya and Klingon. LudwigVan 01:49, 26 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Cases explained?

Don't you think we need a working definition for a case before we begin to list them? --Djacobs 18:54, 8 Apr 2005 (UTC)

English possessive?

Is it accurate to list English with a possessive case? While the "'s/Ø'" morpheme certainly began as an inflection in Old English, and English remains just barely, by the skin of its teeth an inflectional language, and you can see its inflectional parallel in Modern German today (though German's genitive equivalent is dying out in the vernacular), at this point "'s/Ø'" has transformed into a clitic, having neither the quality of an agglutination, nor really of its inflectional origins. Besides undergoing context-dependent sound changes between voicing and devoicing, it doesn't adapt to the word it's suffixed to at all. All nouns take it, without discrimination (yielding weird examples where a plural noun is taking a normally singular possessive clitic, like "the children's"). It's far more similar to the "-ing," "-'ve," "-'d," phenomenon of verb contractions, less contractions than clitics themselves, than true inflectional relics like "oxen" or the oblique declensions of the personal pronouns.

Given that, is it appropriate to list the possessive as a case of the English language? Or if so, should it be noted at the top that these cases include examples of clitics, not just inflection? That broadening would bring a lot more languages into play for examples of grammatical cases. Japanese, for example, fits the inflectional requiremnt, and would fill into locative, nominative, accusative, possessive, instrumental, and dozens of other cases, perhaps rivaling Hungarian's fetish for them.

The same goes for Swedish, listed somewhere as having possessive or genitive case. (I didn't understand all of the above post, but I think this is a relevant reply.) Jørgen 21:18, 20 Jun 2005 (UTC)

English has a distinct possessive case for many pronouns: I, you, he, she, we, and they, and possibly others I'm not thinking of. None of these can take the clitic 's (except in compound constructions like "John and I's", and even then it sounds strange and isn't universally accepted as correct). (I'm ignoring it and who, because while we do write its instead of it's and whose instead of who's, that's an orthographic convention that's not reflected in the spoken language.) Ruakh 14:42, 13 June 2006 (UTC)

Finnish Distributive-temporal case

Finnish seems to have this case as well-- this should be edited in. Some examples:

päivisin 'dayly', maanantaisin 'on each monday', tuntisin 'hourly', öisin 'nightly', etc. Pretty productive. --Alcarilinque 23:06, 24 Apr 2005 (UTC)

It isn't a case in Finnish, because adjectives don't agree with it (you can't say "*pimeisin öisin"). Muhaha 20:49, 19 February 2007 (UTC)

Arabic vocative: is it a case?

I always understood Arabic to have three cases: nominative -u(n), accusative -a(n) and genitive -i(n). These do not require prepositions. The vocative form uses the preposition يا yā with either the nominative case (without nunation) or the construct state form of the noun. I doubt this would truly be classified as a case, or else there would be many more cases, such as inessive (في fī "inside" + genitive), which is much more of a typical Finno-Ugric case than a Semitic one. LudwigVan 01:49, 26 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Arabic has three cases : nominative (-u) for verb subject, accusative (-a) for verb direct object, and a other case (-i) for all prepositions. This prepositional case is sometimes called genitive (or oblique, or even dative according the mother thongue of the grammarian) although a genuine genitive (name complement) exist in arabic, but is zero marked (simple juxtaposition). Now, that is what grammians are used to say, because to tell the true, earing vocals in arabic is sometimes beyong "naked hear" capacity.

Maybe I change the main article. AlainD 11:32, 28 March 2007 (UTC)

What about non-productive cases? (e.g. Dutch genitive)

What is to be done with non-productive cases? Dutch genitive case is really only used in archaic phrases, and is no longer productive. I guess the answer depends on the purpose of this list. If the intent is to list all cases in all languages, then we could include things like Dutch genitive (perhaps with a note). However, then the list is far from complete. If we just want a few good examples for each case, then Dutch genitive is a really bad choice. Thoughts? Junes 21:40, 27 November 2005 (UTC)

Derechative and esquertive; Arrocon

Where did these come from? I don't find any hits for them on Google except for this page. Do they occur in non-constructed languages?

What is Arrocon? A conlang?

Regarding the definitions of the terms, I would think that, if such cases exist, esquertive would be "on the left of" and derechative "on the right of," based on the obvious similarity of the names with Spanish (a la) izquierda (esquerda in Portuguese) "left" and (a la) derecha "right". Correct me if I'm wrong.

Semantic cases

Except for maybe the partitive, the current table List_of_grammatical_cases#Semantics is very disputable. The prepositional case should be in the "Morphosyntactic alignment" table, and the vocative could go either there or in "Relation". I have already removed "Disjunctive" because that isn't even a case (and the article has been accordingly renamed and rewritten and recategorized). CapnPrep 17:40, 11 November 2006 (UTC)

Latin locative

Is locative really to be considedred as one of the Latin cases? As far as I know about Latin there are/were only traces of locative manifesting themselves in (sporadic?) use of the genitive of geographical names to denote location in. 85.8.0.197 00:06, 13 January 2007 (UTC) It isn't 'sporadic', and is productive. If you name a new city, you can still produce locative forms to refer to it. While most forms are identical with the genitive, not all are. A case falling into disuse is still a case. 134.84.238.161 (talk) 16:20, 25 January 2012 (UTC)

the Finnish cases

The "prolative", "temporal" etc. aren't real cases in Finnish because they don't agree with adjectives. Removed. Muhaha 20:54, 19 February 2007 (UTC)

A mising Arabic case

There is an Arabic case that is only used with place-nouns (e.g. in front, behind, above, beneath). The declensions are the same of the acusative case.

e.g. the word amaam أمام means "front." When it is declined in the construct accusative case amaama it will mean "in front of" or "at the front of."

This is just exactly like the described 'temporal case,' but it is for place-nouns instead of time-nouns.

So what evidence makes this case different from the actual accusative? It seems that it's just the plain old accusative case, which happens to alter the meaning of some nouns a bit. If it's morphologically the same, it simply is the accusative. — N-true (talk) 22:50, 21 April 2008 (UTC)

and what makes the temporal case different from the accusative?

If you can't see the difference then don't worry about it.

The accusative is the case of "objects" of the other words, especially verbs. The case I'm talking about is an "adverbial" case used for adverbs not for objects. In Arabic grammar it is called ظرف مكان "condition of place," like how the nouns in temporal case are called ظرف زمان"condition of time."

If you mean that the declensions are the same for the two, then, well, I have seen cases overlap in your list (like Arabic mentioned to have both genitive and prepositional cases, although both cases have exactly the same declensions).HD1986 (talk) 10:29, 22 April 2008 (UTC)

I didn't add the temporal case. I don't know anything about it, it might be just a disguised accusative as well. But if they share the exact same declension paradigm, they're essentially the same case. So this would mean, the accusative has a wider function than just marking the direct object. This is in fact quite typical of many languages. — N-true (talk) 10:54, 22 April 2008 (UTC)

OK. I suggest fixing the thing about Arabic. Arabic has only three cases, the nominative الرفع, the accusative النصب , and the genitive الجرّ (although the last two may be used for quiet different things).

The list does not indicate the Arabic cases correctly. HD1986 (talk) 12:13, 22 April 2008 (UTC)

Ablative case?

The ablative case is listed twice, under 'Motion from' and 'Relation'. They link to the same page, but they don't seem to be the same thing. Why? Xerxes b (talk) 18:59, 15 September 2008 (UTC)

I think that's a matter of naming. It has two functions, motion away from something, and a broader function for different grammatical/syntactical functions as in Latin. One should perhaps rename one or the other, but they do overlap in certain ways and the old name Ablative stuck for Latin and some other well-known languages. — N-true (talk) 20:27, 15 September 2008 (UTC)

Before I mess this page up even more

When trying to put under Allative case, that Sumerian contains an allative case, I messed up the page a little, and would like to know how to fix it. I didn't edit charts on here before and have been offline for a while. Sorry.

Thanks, Abdishtar (talk) 00:58, 1 May 2010 (UTC)

The answer is easy: The Sumerian language has no allative case, it has Directive and Terminative. See for that the excellent German article for Sumerian and the Sumerian Grammar by Dietz Otto Edzard. — N-true (talk) 09:00, 1 May 2010 (UTC)

This really is a matter of terminology; the -šè case used to be called allative in earlier literature but is now more often referred to as terminative, for whatever reason. It really functions as a lative (allative, illative, "I'm going to location X") and more rarely as a terminative. "Directive" isn't even in our list.--91.148.159.4 (talk) 14:27, 17 July 2011 (UTC)

Cases in Portuguese

The article lists 6 cases for Portuguese: accusative, benefactive, comitative, dative, distributive-temporal and genitive. All of these are recent additions to the text. I could imagine some rudiments of old inflections or newborn case-like derivational suffixes on enclitics, e.g. in the pronouns, but claiming that they are cases in the present Portuguese language seems strange. Could somebody please confirm this and provide sound references. --Surfo (talk) 16:55, 9 September 2011 (UTC)

Argumentive-agentive distinctions?

Are there any languages that mark the argument of an intransitive verb or the agent of an intransitive verb which does not (necessarily?) imply an object differently from the agent of a transitive verb that implies an object? Or, rather, that mark the argument of a mediopassive verb differently from the agent of an intransitive verb?

For example, in the sentence "John runs", the word "run" could be interpreted as either intransitive or mediopassive depending upon interpretation. If the transitive form is interpreted as being primarily causative ("John ran his dogs ten miles") then the intransitive form implies an unstated object and the subject is an agent, not just an argument. Otherwise, the verb can be thought of as not a "pure" intransitive verb, but a mediopassive one, and "John" is simply the argument, but not necessarily an agent.

Is there a name for a case which marks an argument of a "mediopassive" intransitive verb differently from agents of transitive/intransitive verbs? This would seem a very logical way to mark cases (or to leave unmarked and contrast with other, marked cases) and such a system could easily have been the basis for nominative-accusative, ergative-absolutive, and active-stative systems. --Þorstejnn (talk) 23:27, 16 July 2012 (UTC)