Could someone please explain the vocative case to me?
They have it apparently in several languages, including Latin. It’s the noun of direct address, in case you don’t know.
In the classic phrase attributed to Julius Caesar, “Et tu, Brute?” the word Brute is in the vocative case. And as I said, I just don’t understand it.
Why do they need a separate case for the noun of direct address? “And you, Brutus?” There, I just said it without a special ending or case. And you knew what I meant.
Plus, how do you refer to your friend, Brutus for example, if you are joking around or talking to him? He is “Brutus” in the third person? But he is “Brute” when you address him? Does that mean “Brute” is kind of your pet name for him? The personal way you address him, in other words? As I said, I for one, find it a little confusing. If not, unnecessary, as I said.
Thank you in advance for your kindly, and civil, replies:).
You needed a special case to distinguish between and you, Brutus and “And you, Brutus?”. In other words, cases served the function in Latin that punctuation serves in English.
If english marked cases, that Jim B. in the above sentence would have indicated that it is vocative. Without cases, you have to rely a lot more on word order to understand a sentence. In English, “The dog bit the man” and “The man bit the dog” mean two very different things. But Latin can’t have that confusion because man and dog will take case endings that indicate their role in the sentence and therefore they can move about within it without destroying the intended meaning.
If you were a Latin speaker and you were chatting with your friend Brutus, you would use Brute anytime you referred to him directly.
There are really two different questions here. The first is why Latin has different word endings for different cases at all, and the second is why vocative is one of those cases.
To the first, it’s as others have said, that Latin uses word endings to convey the same information that English uses word order, prepositions, and other structures to convey.
To the second, I think that maybe the speakers of Latin might have been heading towards the same conclusion, given that the vocative is usually formed the same way as the nominative.
Here’s a good little lesson. It’s for Irish but the generalities apply to most inflected languages.
And a personal anecdote: I discovered the vocative case when an Irish relative told me that Seamus and Hamish were the same person. He’s Seamus when you’re talking to him, and he’s Hamish when your talking about him.
OK, I believe I understand the concept, but why “Brute” in the vocative case, instead of “Bruti”, or “Bruto”, or some other form? From the two examples you’ve given it seems like the rule is “Drop the ‘us’, and add an ‘e’ if the result ends in a consonant”…but it must be more complicated than that. Not all names end in “us” for one thing. Is there a general rule?
I think I understand the idea of different noun forms for different cases, but I don’t see how it applies to names, which don’t necessarily have to follow any rules of ‘normal usage’. Or were names more ‘standardized’ in Latin than they are in today’s English?
ETA: It looks like the link given by **mikecurtis **pretty much answers my question (I assume that Latin had similar rules to those shown here for Irish). From my modern point of view it seems like an unnecessarily complicated exercise just to be able to figure out how to address someone directly, but I imagine that if I grew up speaking a language that includes this feature it would become second nature to me…much like I know how to pronounce “ough” in the words cough, through, though, bough, and rough
Vocative is always the same as nominative except second declensions ending with -us change to -e and second declensions ending with -ius change to -i. It probably feels like a lot because a lot of roman names end with -us or -ius but that just means you get lots of practice making the same inflection.
Another example, from Sanskrit, is “Hare Kṛṣṇa.” The first name is Hari in the nominative, but here the vocative ends in -e exactly as in Latin. The vocative -e they have in common descends directly from Proto-Indo-European.
Well, it’s definitely not just Latin: the -e vocative in this o-stem second declension also occurs in Greek, Sanskrit, Lithuanian, etc., so it must be inherited from the Indo-European proto-language. The explanation is apparently that the -o in -us (-os) turns into -e due to Ablaut and that is preserved in the vocative singular of such nouns. Note that (classically, anyway) -ius in some names turns into -i (long i), so filius -> fili, Pompeius -> Pompei, but there are exceptions and Greek forms so the best thing to do is read that link carefully, memorize everything, and practice makes perfect…
and you Brutus
Brutus and you
Brutus you and
Would all be acceptable Latin sentences that meant the same thing, as long as the words kept the same endings.
Nouns in Latin come in five different categories called “declensions” (though in practice, words in the fourth and fifth declensions are pretty rare). Each declension has its own rules for forming all of the case endings.
First declension nouns end in -a in the nominative singular, and are (almost) always feminine. Examples include “femina” and “antenna”. Second declension nouns end in either -us or -um in the nominative singular, and are either masculine (-us) or neuter (-um). Examples include “radius” and “bacterium”. Words that could be masculine or feminine often have a form in each of these declensions, like “alumna” and “alumnus”. There are also adjectives that can be either declension, depending on the gender of what they’re describing, like “bona” or “bonus”. Third declension nouns can end in anything in the nominative singular, but most often -is, and can be any gender. It’s only the nominative form in the third declension that varies; all the others are consistent.
It’s interesting to me that this thread popped up today. I am currently listening to The History of English Podcast; it’s a fabulous listen, which so far (I’m only on episode 9) hasn’t yet gotten around to much discussion of English itself as it has about the precursors to English, primarily focusing on Proto-Indo-European…and one of the episodes I listened to this afternoon was all about inflections: what they are, how they work, and why we don’t for the most part have them in English any more.
This brings back terrible memories about learning Sanskrit declension back in middle school and how much memorization it required. Sanskrit is a highly inflected language.
Wikipedia explains it well : “A vocative expression is an expression of direct address by which the identity of the party spoken to is set forth expressly within a sentence.
For example, in the sentence “I don’t know, John,” John is a vocative expression that indicates the party being addressed, as opposed to the sentence “I don’t know John” in which “John” is the direct object of the verb “know.”
Wikipedia goes on to add :Historically, the vocative case was an element of the Indo-European case system and existed in Latin, Tamil, Sanskrit and Classical Greek. Many modern Indo-European languages (English, Spanish, etc.) have lost the vocative case, but others retain it, …
The rules for names vary by language, but in many of them they are treated like any other noun and take all the normal case endings. Latin is not special that way.
Use of the vocative case in ancient languages explains the use of the word “O” in a lot of English translations, such as “Sing, O Muse, of the rage of Achilles” - in the original Greek, Muse would have the vocative ending and Achilles wouldn’t (it would have the possessive ending I suspect); in English, word order is telling us the Homer is talking to the Muse about Achille’s rage, and not to Achilles.
You also see “O” in poetry by people who knew their Latin and Greek - such as T. S. Eliot, who wrote in his poem “The Addressing of Cats” that
“I bow, and taking off my hat,
Ad-dress him in this form: O CAT!”
I always remember the fourth declension by the word for “horn”: cornu
In Peter Schickele’s hilarious “broadcast” of the competition between a conductor and an orchestra while playing Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, there is a point where one of the French horns plays a clinker of a note. His name is noted to be Bobby Cornu. That always makes me chuckle.
