Just in Case…

One of the most common grammar problems is differentiating between I and me. Grammatically, we call that an issue with pronoun case. There are three cases in the English language: Nominative, possessive, and objective. We use cases only with pronouns, and the possessive case doesn’t pose much of a problem except with misplaced apostrophes (solution: no possessive pronouns have an apostrophe: its, ours, theirs, etc). The nominative and objective cases cause the problems. For the sake of this post, all we will say is that nominative case is used for pronouns that are sentence subjects (or predicate nominatives). Objective case is, unsurprisingly, used for objects, whether they are direct objects, indirect objects, or objects of a preposition. Here are some examples:

• We are taking a vacation. (We is the subject.)   This is she. (She is a predicate nominative.)
• I am taking a vacation with him. (Him is the object of the preposition with.)
• I am following you. (You is the direct object of the verb following.)
• I am baking her a cake. (Her is the indirect object of the verb baking.)

Now, imagine if Latin were not an outdated language, and you had to be aware of not three cases, but five — and those cases were used for nouns.  Actually, there are six, but I learned only five. The cases in Latin change the end of the word. You may remember this from your high school Latin class. Oddly, I loved Latin and took five years of it.  Here are the Latin cases. We will use the common noun puella (girl) for illustrate:

• Nominative – Used for a subject or predicate nominative, just as in English. Puella is the singular; puellae is the plural.
• Genitive –  Used for a possessive noun. Puellae is singular; puellårum is plural.
• Dative – Used for indirect objects. I gave the girl a gift would be puellae; plural is puellis.
• Accusative – Used for direct objects.  Singular is puellam; plural is puellås.
• Ablative – Used primarily for objects of prepositions, but you don’t need the preposition. Singular is puellå; plural is puellås.
• Vocative – Used for what we call direct address (Girl, please comb your hair!). Form is the same as nominative.
• Locative – Rarely used, but would be a seventh case.

NOTE: My little circles should actually be lines to indicate a long vowel sound. I couldn’t figure out how to do the line on my Mac. 

Keep in mind there are also masculine and feminine nouns in Latin (and many other languages) but we don’t need to worry about that in English. 

More that we don’t need to worry about:

• English at one time did have noun cases, but those have gone, leaving only pronouns with cases.( Whew!!)
• Hungarian has around 17 cases, although it depends on the grouping. Some say it is more than 20!
• Russian has six cases.
• German has four cases.
• Finnish has 25 cases.
• Tsez has at least 36 cases. Tsez is a Northeast Caucasian language with about 15,000 speakers spoken by the Tsez, a Muslim people in the mountainous Tsunta District of southwestern Dagestan in Russia.

And we cannot figure out the difference between I and me????