How did case systems evolve? It seems to go against the current, so to speak, to have a case system evolve when the trend is for languages to go towards fewer cases (example: German has four cases, while English has only two, with bare rudiments of a third)? Why, in the name of whichever deity you prefer (or do not), would cases evolve in the first place?
We have linguists on the board, so they’ll probably be along to shoot me down in flames shortly, but here is my WAG*: redundancy is useful in speech. Having a mode of speech which narrows down the sorts of expressions a sentence may be expected to enunciate as well as particular words which specify meaning may help to increase the chances that one will be understood.
*[sub]Wild Arsed Guess.[/sub]
Let us first dispense with an incorrect argument that, although you didn’t mean it, may confuse some others. English is not the language; although, given the prominence of English speakers in the contemporary world, we may imagine that it will have considerable influence on the evolution of other languages, it is not necessarily the sole or even dominant influence.
Now, grammatical case. It is now generally conceded that the human brain has encoded in it a certain grammar (from the observation that creole grammars the world over are remarkably similiar). This grammar appears to have a strong positional (like contemporary English grammar) bias. However, once a language begins to grow out of the creole stage, the grammar seems to acquire, e.g., case and tense markers, which are later regularized into declensions and conjugations (see the indigenous deaf sign language in Nicaragua). We might argue that the simple positional grammar of creoles is inadequate for expressing the full range of emotions and ideas in a functioning society, and must be supplemented by some others means. We might also argue that English as we know it is essentially a creole derived from the interaction of Anglo-Saxons, Danes, and Normans (plus the odd priest and pedant), and the later colonizing abilities of the English[sup]1[/sup], so that it has not yet had time to settle down and acquire a mature (inflected) grammar.
[sup]1[/sup][sub]Which more than one writer has attributed to the notion that the climate of England is so miserable, that anyone with an ounce of gumption went somewhere else.[/sub]
Sorry for my obscene stupidity here, but what is a “case system?” I consider myself fairly grammatically literate, but have never heard this term.
Friedo, here’s a good summary description of what a “case system” means linguistically. This site describes the Russian language, but the generalities are valid among most all languages possessing case systems:
From http://www.departments.bucknell.edu/russian/language/case.html :
“The case system (in Russian) does two things. First, it marks the grammatical functions of nouns which are indicated by word order in English, that is, the subject, object and indirect object of the sentence. (This means that these nouns are free to be ordered almost anywhere in the sentence since their function is clearly indicated by their form.) Second, cases mark certain adverbial functions such as the time, manner, and means of carrying our an action, which are marked by prepositions in English, (e.g. by hand, on Friday, with enthusiasm).”
(My emphasis & parentheses)
Read the rest of that link for more detailed examples of noun cases.
In English the only remnant of case is in pronouns. English has three cases: Nominative, Objective, and Genitive (possessive)
Nominative: I
Objective: me
Genitive: my, mine
Latin has (had?) five cases: nominative, genitive, dative, accusative, and ablative.
Plus a lesser-used vocative case for direct address, as in Et tu, Brute? Brute is the vocative form of Brutus.
Languages do have a tendency to simplify in certain respects. While English has only vestigal cases, it has an abundance of prepositions, which serve the same function as cases. The prepositions “from, with, in, by” are commonly used to translate the ablative case in Latin.
German as well only has a vestigal case system, though it is certainly more robust than that of English. The nouns themselves are not modified, only the articles preceeding them.
Furthermore, be careful not to mistake causes for effects. The idea of inflection is a construct that we impose on language to systematize it and make it understandable. In early languages, especially Latin, Greek, and Sanskrit, the word order is flexible, hence some criteria are necessary to distinguish a plural noun serving one function in a sentence from another, even if both of them have the same case ending. Hence the case system “evolved” in order to meet the needs of the language, and not the reverse.
MR
IIRC, the German genitive case can modify the ending of the noun. Just a trifling point.
You are absolutely right. It modifies it (usually) with -s.
MR
A good example here would be the transition from Greek to Latin. Ancient Greek has four cases (with oversimplified usage in parentheses): nominative (subject), genitive (possessive), dative (indirect object), and accusative (direct object). Latin kept these four cases, but added the ablative (grab bag) case. Why? The ablative case has a lot of special uses. Most prepositions have their objects in the ablative; ablative is used for certain constructs (ablative of time when to denote a specific time, ablative of means to denote an item used, etc.). In Greek, these functions were simply spread among the cases, so you’d have (IIRC) a dative of time when, a genitive of means, etc. So even though a case was added it made the language a lot less confusing.
(Incidentally, a conniving teacher got me sold on taking Greek b/c he said it was easier, since it had only 4 cases and only 3 declensions. These complexities are the had thing about Greek IMO, not the Greek alphabet.)
One thing I’ve often wondered: it’s often said that in “cased” languages such as Russian or German, word order is not that important - you can put the nouns anywhere you like and the sentence is still grammatical. Sounds great, but is it true in practice? Or is it usual to use a particular order, say subject - object -indirect object? Or perhaps you can use different noun orders to impart different “flavours” to your sentences?
And anyway, can’t you do the same thing in English? You could say “I gave a bone to the dog”, or “I gave to the dog a bone”, or even “To the dog a bone I gave” if you’re feeling pretentious.
Not really. “Man bites dog.” does not mean the same thing as “Dog bites man.”
Be happy that you are not in the process of learning a Fenno-Ugric language. I remember saying in passing to a friend that Estonian has only fifteen cases in camparison with Finnish, that has seventeen. He immediately corrected me and told me that Estonian actually has twentytwo, but the last seven are very rarely used nowadays.
**
And in certain nouns in the dative, the noun is changed a bit. For example, das Haus becomes dem Hause in the dative. Endings can take other forms as well; I’ve seen en and eln added to noun endings. These nouns are restricted, thankfully, to the masculine and neuter genders only (*), and are pretty easy to remember when one gets the hang of them.
I didn’t realize that German’s case system was vestigial. I’d love to learn a language that has a full-fledged case system, but only because I’m a glutton for punishment.
(*)- [sub]Correct me if I’m wrong, those who know what they’re talking about. I’ve been studying German for about nine months, and so far, can only carry on a five-minute conversation, and read a newspaper verrrrrry slowly. I bow humbly to instantaneous translators of any language.**
Lithuanian is the one living Indo-European language I can think of offhand that still has all eight of the Proto-Indo-European cases.
Students of Uralic languages love to awe people by saying they’re learning twenty-two (or whatever huge number) of cases. In practice, it isn’t so scary because these languages have the agglutinative structure. Each case is just a suffix that retains the same form every time you stick it on the end of a word. Easier to learn than in a synthetically inflecting language like Latin where there are multiple declensional schemes and no particular form to each case, which must be memorized individually. In Finnish, some case suffixes have fused their form so they have to be memorized specially, but on the whole, Uralic cases are transparent.
Which brings up the question of the OP—How did cases evolve? So far you guys have done a good job of answering why cases are used, but now as to how they developed:
Apparently they originated as suffixes, as can be seen in Ural-Altaic languages. In Turkish the case suffixes are still completely transparent. Each one retains the same form regardless of the word being singular or plural (plurality itself is a suffix). In Finnish, they have partly fused with the word. In Indo-European, apparently, they are completely fused.
Hungarian is a good illustration of this. The Hungarian inessive case, referring to location inside something, uses the suffix *-ban *or -ben. The illative (going into something) suffix is -ba/-be. The elative (coming out from the inside) is -böl. These apparently come from the word bél meaning ‘intestine’. Originally it was an independent word that became attached as a suffix.
Jayzus, I thought I was badly off trying to learn Czech (7 cases)
I did German at school but it was never explained what cases were for they were just there to be memorised. I had no real idea of their purpose. I was also sufficiently immature not to ask. D’oh.