The case of the elusive declension

There are many aspects of languages that many people hear about but never get a chance to study either because they have never studied a foreign language or they have never studied a language which uses those aspects. One of the greatest things about langauge is that if you can come up with a consistent way for humans to use it in communication, it probably already exists in some fashion in one of the thousands of languages spread across the globe. After all, who would have thought that a word ending could turn a word into an insult (See: TKT #4: French Pejorative Suffixes) or that clicks could be used in words or that hand gestures could become a language all on its own? I’ll write TKTs for both clicks and sign language later, but for now, I just want to show that there are lots–I mean LOTS–of possible building blocks for languages to use. Some languages make lots of use of certain aspects such as nasality, declensions, or affixation; some languages make little use of certain aspects such as the subjunctive mood, consonant aspiration, or even the use of tense at all. The point is, the possibilities are damn near endless. Today’s TKT deals with one such aspect that languages can use for communication which lots of people have heard of but most have never really gotten a chance to understand. Today, it’s the case of the case.

First off, a few new definitions need to be made clear. Remember how we talked about affixes back in TKT #4? Well, affixes can be either inflectional or derivational. Derivational affixes change the word class or meaning. An example of this is the -ly ending which when added to adjectives or nouns turns them into an adverb. English makes extensive use of this to create word families like metal, metallurgy, metallic, etc. Inflectional affixes, the ones we’ll be talking about today, create variant forms of a word to mark syntactic functions or grammatical relationships. English uses inflection to mark words for tense and number as well as possession. For example, the third person singular’s present tense verb is marked with an -s as in “He danses.” Inflectional markers will be featured prominately in today’s TKT. A case as it is referred to in linguistic terms corresponds to and marks nouns and pronouns with categories such as subject, direct object, indirect object, and the object of a preposition. Cases most often mark nouns and pronouns as to their relationship with the verb, but cases can also be used with adjectives to show their relationship to nouns, etc. What most people refer to as a declension is really just another term for an inflectional paradigm, each one a pattern for a noun, adjective or pronoun paradigm. Still with me? That’s a lot of terms, but hopefully the next part will help.

There are lots of inflectional paradigms. English essentially has only two true cases: the common case and the possessive case. The common case is used for all grammatical functions of nouns except the possessive. “Chicken” remains “chicken” whether the subject, direct object, indirect object or object of a preposition. Therefore, “chicken” is the common case for “chicken” in English. “Chicken’s” is the possessive case as in “the chicken’s feet.” The possessive case is commonly called the genitive. There are lots of different cases. Some languages have many declensions, some have none. Latin, for instance–a language notorious for its cases, supposedly making it a “difficult” language–had not only a genitive case but also the nominative (used principally for marking the subject), the dative (used for indirect objects and the objects of particular prepositions), the accusative (for direct objects and objects of other prepositions), and the ablative/instrumental (for the objects of still other prepositions and for instrumental functions). There is technically also the vocative used in interjections like Ō fortuna “O fortune,” but it’s not often listed since it often has the same form as the nominative. Irish has cases: nominative/accusative, genitive, dative, and vocative. German also has cases: nominative, accusative, genitive, and dative. Old English used to have the same four as modern German with the addition of the instrumental. Middle English dropped the instrumental and merged the nominative and accusative. Over time, we merged the dative into the nominative/accusative group giving us the common and genitive that we have now. Don’t think that the above cases are all there are. There are lots of other cases…lots–tons of which you can find on Wikipedia’s List of Grammatical Cases. Remember, if you can come up with a consistent way to use something in language, it probably already exists somewhere.

So now that we know what cases (or declensions or inflectional paradigms) are, how do we use them? Put simply, the way cases generally work is by adding an inflectional affix to a word (noun, adjective, verb) in order to give it a specific meaning within a sentence. For some languages, this means the word can be found anywhere in the sentence and its function will still be understood. So if a noun gets an affix which means “subject,” it can be at the beginning, end or middle of the sentence but is still understood to be the subject. For others, the word still has to be in a particular place, but the inflection clarifies it, makes it more meaningful to other speakers of the language (or makes it redundant, depending on how you look at it). Whether its position matters or not is up to the language in question. Let’s look at an example in Latin, shall we?

            Agricola vīdit lupum.

            Lupum vīdit agricola.

            Agricola lupum vīdit.

All of the above mean “The farmer saw the wolf.” Because -a marks the subject and -um marks the direct object, it doesn’t really matter as much where they appear in the sentence in order to convey the same meaning. English can’t do this. We have to have our sentence order in order to make sense of what we’re hearing/reading. “The farmer saw the wolf” cannot be rearranged with the words given and still have the same meaning (except for, perhaps, the poetic “The wolf the farmer saw,” but that’s not standard English). This is not to say that you can go all willy-nilly in Latin; they still had preferences as to word order, but it was considerably more flexible than Modern English. To be honest, this system isn’t altogether that difficult to grasp. English may not have the same cases for nouns but does for pronouns. After all, we can tell that “she” is going to be a subject whereas “her” could never be (in standard English, that is). Same thing. Where people get scared and put off about cases isn’t how they’re used since we have the same grammatical functions, it’s the morphology which scares English speakers, the intricate differences between what types of words get what suffixes versus other categories of words which get other suffixes which are different but serve the same purpose. Look at the above example again but with the wolf as the subject and the farmer as object:

            Agricolam vīdit lupus.

            Lupus vīdit agricolam.

            Agricolam lupus vīdit.

“The wolf saw the farmer.” Why aren’t the endings the same? Doesn’t -a mark subject and -um mark direct object? The endings aren’t the same because of the language’s other constraints: grammatical gender, pronunciation, and other irregularities which pop up when a language has been around a very long time. That’s why most English speakers are afraid of declensions; it’s not the general idea of subject, object, etc., it’s the way in which declensions are implemented and all of the subsequent rules which follow. Cases also often follow different rules depending on each language. What may be stated in the accusative in one language is translated to the absolutive in another, etc. The concepts of agent, position, even motion vary from language to language, and that makes cases appear more difficult than they actually are. The idea is simple; the practice isn’t necessarily.

So in solving the case of the elusive declension, we’ve discovered that part of why it’s confusing is because it has so many different names (case, declension, inflectional paradigm) and another reason why it’s confusing is that it has so many uses–far more than we as English speakers probably have ever considered. Add to that the implementation of cases which requires an understanding of a language’s grammatical gender, phonotactic constraints (that is, whether its sound system allows for certain sound combinations), and unique particularities, and you’ve got a jumble of data which appears fairly imposing. Hopefully, I’ve helped take a sword to that particular knot so you can understand cases and their uses a little better, even if you never have to study or use them. Believe me, this post is fairly over-simplified as it is, but it gets to the heart of the matter. Cases aren’t scary; they’re just misunderstood.

If the accent marks on the Latin above aren’t showing up on your computer, it’s either your browser, your system or the internet. They’re there; I’ve just been having a lot of difficulty coming up with the appropriate codes to make them visible to everyone.