I was looking through an online Russian textbook, and the one thing that caught my eye was something called an ‘instrumental case’. While I understand case systems perfectly well, my self-study of German giving me that, I wondered what the heck an ‘instrumental case’ was.
Later, I read a thread which mentioned other cases. The vocative, declarative (?), and so on. That further whetted my curiousity.
Can someone please explain these other cases, by which I mean cases other than the nominative, accusative, dative, and genitive? I’d appreciate it greatly.
I only can give information about the ablative and the vocative which, together with the standard cases you’ve mentioned, build up the Latin case system.
The vocative is the case used when you directly address a person. So in “Hi, Bob, how are you?” Bobwould be a vocative, although it’s of course not visible in English, which does not have cases. In Latin, vocatives are always except for one declination identical to the nominative (this is why Casear’s last words are said to have been “tu quoque fili”: *fili[i/] is the vocative of filius, son.)
The ablative in Latin has many different functions; one of this is, I suppose, the one of your Russian instrumental case: It gives the instrument which helps you to do something. Thus if a Roman killed someone with his sword, he had to turn the sword into the ablative: gladius becomes gladio. The ablative has quite a few other functions in Latin, but one of the most important is the instrumental one.
I only can give information about the ablative and the vocative which, together with the standard cases you’ve mentioned, build up the Latin case system.
The vocative is the case used when you directly address a person. So in “Hi, Bob, how are you?” Bobwould be a vocative, although it’s of course not visible in English, which does not have cases. In Latin, vocatives are always except for one declination identical to the nominative (this is why Casear’s last words are said to have been “tu quoque fili”: fili is the vocative of filius, son.)
The ablative in Latin has many different functions; one of this is, I suppose, the one of your Russian instrumental case: It gives the instrument which helps you to do something. Thus if a Roman killed someone with his sword, he had to turn the sword into the ablative: gladius becomes gladio. The ablative has quite a few other functions in Latin, but one of the most important is the instrumental one.
Case structures exist to show what role a given word fills in a sentence. There are other ways to do this: English, for example, (mostly) uses word order to do the same job. (English pronouns have some remnants of a case structure; basically, they come in a nominative [subject of sentence] and, well, not-nominative form).
Standard example; in English, Brutus killed Caesar shows who did what to whom by way of word order; change the order around (Caesar killed Brutus) and you chnage the meaning of the sentence. In Latin, though, the case endings show the roles in the sentence: Brutus necavit Caesarem means the same as Caesarem necavit Brutus; if you want to change who did whom, you have to say Caesar necavit Brutum.
Case structures vary from language to language: as noted, German gets by with four, Russian with five, Latin with six, and I’ve heard that Finnish has sixteen (which put me off learning Finnish, rather). As Schnitte points out, there’s a fairly strong overlap between the Latin ablative and the Russian instrumental, though it’s not exact.
One way of looking at it might be through prepositions, which English uses extensively to establish relationships. For example, the Latin dative is often expressed with English to, genitive with of, ablative with by or with.
Actually, this used to be where Latin-to-English translators would insert that quaint salutation “O”, as in "Hi, O Bob!
I’ve noticed also that old textbooks would use O to express the vocative in english, saying, for instance, that such and such ending of Rex was vocative, and therefore meant “O King!”.
Lithuanian still has a vocative in some declensions.
Yes… this convention worked so well in Latin textbooks, which often used inanimate nouns to demonstrate the declensions (“1st decl., Nom. mensa, a table; Voc. mensa, O table!”… cue giggling from schoolboys wondering why the ancient Romans talked to tables).
[rotten joke]
Q: How do you decline an irregular Latin noun?
A: “No thank you, I don’t want an irregular Latin noun.”
[/rotten joke]
Proto-Indo-European probably had 8 noun cases, which we generally call by their anglicized Latin names [ul]
nominative (subject of the verb)
accusative (direct object of the verb)
genitive (possessive, in whose possession)
dative (indirect object, to whom given)
locative (at which place)
ablative (from which place)
instrumental (by which means)
vocative (to whom addressed)[/ul]The instrumental case was lost early in Latin’s ancestry. Proto-Slavic had lost its ablative form, and Proto-Germanic had lost its locative. The strong tendency has been for further losses to occur since then.
You shouldn’t always assume that a case called by one of the above names is necessarily a direct descendant of the Proto-Indo-European case. Early grammarians named cases by the role they play in a sentence, not by their etymology. I can’t think of a specific example of a mis-named case in an IE language, but I do vaguely remember reading that they exist (in Icelandic?).
Since Finnish is not an IE language, the 15 to 20 Finnish cases are not etymologically related to the IE cases, but some of them are given Latin-style names anyway.