# Case acquirement



## merquiades

The development of Western Romance languages shows that the Latin case system broke down and was eliminated.  The surviving unique noun form derives from the accusative case and not the nominative.  The rationale being that this case is the most frequent in conversation so the form stuck.   Sentences like _Hominem video_ (I see the man) would appear to occur more frequently than _Homo videt_ (the man sees).   This gave _hominem_ > _hómne_ > _hombre_ in Castilian Spanish for example.

In languages such as High German and the Slavic languages, for example, where cases have been maintained, is the accusative case also a reference for the common people?  _Ich sehe den Mann_.   _Я вижу человека_.  For example, do natives acquire these forms before the nominative or dative?  I have been told that Austrian natives do not acquire naturally the genitive case as it is not used in their colloquial speech.  So people have lost the natural ability to form it and use it.  The only learn it in schooling later.  I'm interested in knowing what perception natives have of cases in their own languages.
This is interesting in that foreign manuals give much emphasis to the nominative and accusative is left for later.


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## Riverplatense

merquiades said:


> In languages [...] where cases have been maintained, is the accusative case also a reference for the common people? _Ich sehe den Mann_. _Я вижу человека_. For example, do natives acquire these forms before the nominative or dative?



I'm not sure if I got this question right, yet also the nominative can refer to the common people in the same way in German and, as far as I know, in Russian. And I also think that the nominative is the first case to be acquired in the individual development.



merquiades said:


> I have been told that Austrian natives do not acquire naturally the genitive case as it is not used in their colloquial speech. So people have lost the natural ability to form it and use it. The only learn it in schooling later.



That's right, but doesn't only go for Austrians. In Austria, however, there's an additional example of case syncretism consisting in the loss of dative plural (_mit die Kinder_ instead of _mit den Kindern_ etc.).



merquiades said:


> I'm interested in knowing what perception natives have of cases in their own languages.



Me too, but I'm not so sure if there's a huge difference between a synthetic case system and the analytical conception Romance, for instance, has developed. I rather think that even if there's no morphological cases left (apart from Romanian), the perception doesn't differ a lot, because the semantic cases are rendered clearly in every language. In my personal perception I also don't see a real difference between the actual genitive form (_das Buch des Mädchens_ ‹the girl's book›) and the prepositional periphrasis (_das Buch vom Mädchen_ ‹the book of the girl›).

Of course, the question of case systems is quite complex, and of course it's too easy to explain case syncretism only by phonological means, but still I'm doubtful about concrete differences in the perception. And, of course, also analytical systems are still evolving, like the prepositional accusative in a lot of Southern Romance languages shows.


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## sumelic

Actually, my impression is that the dominance of the accusative over the nominative forms in Romance languages that lost case is a somewhat typologically unusual development. Usually, a nominative case is considered to be closer to a "default" case than an accusative case. The development of Romance forms may have been affected by the fact that the Latin Accusative was built on the same base as all of the other case-forms aside from the Nominative.

From what I remember, there is no analogous phenomenon in the morphology of the German Nominative. I believe children acquire the core German cases of Nominative and Accusative quite early; the reduction in the use of the German Genitive is a separate phenomenon that doesn't imply general loss of the language's case system.

Likewise, as far as I know, in the Slavic languages with case systems, case is acquired early on and native speakers have no confusion between the nominative and accusative (there are some words that are apparently difficult to decline in some way, but my understanding is that that's a very specific phenomenon that doesn't indicate any kind of breakdown of the case system as a whole).

Interestingly, we do see some use of the former accusative forms of pronouns as a kind of "default" in some of the Germanic languages that have lost (or almost lost) case on normal nouns. E.g. in English, the "It's me" phenomenon (where it might be partly based on French influence, although it seems hard to show that), and I think I remember reading that there are similar uses of the accusative in ... maybe Frisian (?), and some mainland North Germanic languages.

A relevant Linguistics Stack Exchange question: Do unschooled people use cases correctly, e.g. in Germany and in Russia?


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## Riverplatense

sumelic said:


> […] the reduction in the use of the German Genitive is a separate phenomenon that doesn't imply general loss of the language's case system.





sumelic said:


> […] that's a very specific phenomenon that doesn't indicate any kind of breakdown of the case system as a whole



But isn't the loss of cases a general phenomenon in IE languages? Almost all IE languages have reduced their case system. Of course, the shift from a 7-6-case language like (Pre-/Classical) Latin to a 0-case language like Italian seems to have happened more quickly, but still the structural evolution is actually the same: _liber puellae → il libro della ragazza_ : _das Buch des Mädchens → das Buch vom Mädchen_.



sumelic said:


> A relevant Linguistics Stack Exchange question: Do unschooled people use cases correctly, e.g. in Germany and in Russia?



I haven't read the thread there, but my answer would be clearly affirmative. After all, being «unschooled» is actually the regular case, and the case system of the languages aren't usually taught and learnt somewhere conscientiously, but acquired naturally. Certainly, there can be discrepancies when a case is on the way to be extinct, but in my point of view this just means that the written language and normative grammar are still conserving a state that isn't actually «real» any more.


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## jmx

In the case of the Romance languages, I think that early French still had a declension with 2 cases, nominative and oblique, where the oblique case was the result of all other cases merging. If the same thing had happened at some point in all the Romanic languages, it makes sense that the oblique case was the most common one in speech, and therefore, when nominative and oblique finally merged, it was the latter the one retained in noun forms.


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## Riverplatense

jmx said:


> If the same thing had happened at some point in all the Romanic languages, it makes sense that the oblique case was the most common one in speech, and therefore, when nominative and oblique finally merged, it was the latter the one retained in noun forms.



However, I'm not sure if the use of accusatives in subject function (like attested in the famous epitaph reading _hic quescunt [sic!] duas matres duas filias et advenas II parvolas_) only happened when the case system had already collapsed. On the other hand, there seems to be a certain tendency to substitute casus-rectus forms by oblique ones, like in English _it's me_, but also Italian _lui_, _lei _as a subject, and nowadays —under certain circumstances— also _te_.


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## Sobakus

No, to my knowledge the default case in every language is the Nominative, given that it expresses the subject. The other cases express some dependent syntactic relation to other words in a sentence and in the absence of such can't stand on their own. When you name something on its own, you use the Nominative, a fact that is reflected in its very name.


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## francisgranada

The distinction between the concept of _accusative _(denoting the object) and the _nominative _(indicating the the subject) is fundamental for the elemental understanding of a sentence or, in general, for expressing of an idea. Thus the distinction remains even after the collapse of the the declension system: the solution is often the fixed word order (in modern Romance languages, in English, etc.). Or in Slavic, where the declension system did non collapse, however for phonetic reasons, in masculine animated nouns the accusative was no more distinguishable from the nominative. The solution was to use the genitive case ending in function of accusative (e.g. in Russian _vižu čelovek*a* _instead of the former_ vižu čelovek_*ъ *- "I see a/the man").

Thus, due to the importance of the distinction between the subject and the object, I don't believe that the Latin accusative substituted somehow the nominative because of it's more frequent statistical occurence. I rather think that when the simplified Latin accusative form became the basic and unique form of nouns and adjectives (at least in singular), it didn't have the accusative function any more. Because of the loss of the final consonant (typically -m) and other phonetic changes, after a certain period of "oscillation" it could gradually merge with "the rest" of other grammatical cases.

(In other words, it was rather a complex  _process _than a _replacement _...)


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## gburtonio

There's a simple explanation for accusative pronoun forms becoming the nominative form, which is that in pro-drop languages, i.e. those in which an explicit subject is not required, the nominative forms are simply used less frequently than the accusative forms. Hence you get lui/lei as subject forms in Italian, also 'mi' (= I) as a subject in many Italian dialects and 'main' (=I) in Hindi/Punjabi. I'm sure there are other cases, but I don't think 'it's me' in English is one, as the nominative forms are maintained. It's just a different use of the accusative form – perhaps under the influence of French – that is seen as strange in English mainly, in my view, because we don't have a technical name for it.


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## francisgranada

Yes, but the Latin accusative of the nominative _ille _(Italian _egli_) and _illa _(Italian _ella_) is _illum _and _illam_. In other words, the Italian  _lui/lei_ do not derive from the Latin accusative forms, they rather seem to derive from some kind of a Latin genitive (or dative?).

(The original question is about the possible preference of the Latin _accusative _over the _nominative _in the corresponding forms in Romance languages).

The reason of the usage of _lui/lei _instead of _egli/ella_ could be explained by the continuing tendency of the elimination of the usage of more forms for the same pronoun, as no declension exists anymore, independently on the origin/etymology of the given forms of the pronoun.

(My personal opinion ...)


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## Nino83

merquiades said:


> In languages such as High German and the Slavic languages, for example, where cases have been maintained, is the accusative case also a reference for the common people?


It seems that in Low German and Dutch the nominative case prevailed, like in katt (cat) and neef (nephew).
katto - Wiktionary
Reconstruction:Proto-Germanic/nefô - Wiktionary
It seems that in Southern Dutch (Flemish) nouns derive from the accusative case.
Archaic Dutch declension - Wikipedia


Riverplatense said:


> like the prepositional accusative in a lot of Southern Romance languages shows.


With the difference that in Spanish there is case syncretism.
Le (dative) he visto a Juán. (Spanish)
Lu (accusative) vitti a Giuanni. (Sicilian)
L'ho (accusative) visto a Giovanni. (Regional Italian)


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## Riverplatense

Nino83 said:


> Le (dative) he visto a Juán.



However, that's not what the Real Academia actually prescribes. If I'm not mistaken, _leísmo _(the use of _le_ instead of _lo_) is a regional Spanish variant, and is accepted only with a masculine object. 

Edit: Or one could precisely interpret _leísmo _as case syncretism.



gburtonio said:


> I'm sure there are other cases, but I don't think 'it's me' in English is one, as the nominative forms are maintained.



The situation reminds me a bit of the Italian opposition _lui_ : _egli_. Of course, today _egli _is almost completely out of use, but in its nature as a semi-clitic nominative pronoun it shows parallels to English:

?It's I → it's me
*È egli → è lui

?You and I → you and me
*Io ed egli → io e lui

(I'm not sure if it's completely the same with the third person in English)

By the way, I'm not sure, but isn't there a quote by Bob Marley saying _Me don't love fighting, but ..._


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## Nino83

francisgranada said:


> the Italian _lui/lei_ do not derive from the Latin accusative forms, they rather seem to derive from some kind of a Latin genitive (or dative?)


According to Loporcaro and others in Vulgar Latin there was some case syncretism between dative and genitive, with the dative _illui/illei_ in the singular and the genitive _illorum_ in the plural as oblique stressed pronouns. So we have the Italian _lui, lei, loro_ and the French _lui, leur_.


Riverplatense said:


> The situation reminds me a bit of the Italian opposition _lui_ : _egli_.


In Sicilian it's _iḍḍu/iḍḍa_ (< illum/illam) and _iḍḍi_ (< illi/illae) as subject weak and oblique strong forms, in Neapolitan it's _issə_ (< ipsum/ipsam) and _lorə_ (< illorum).

Italian derives from Tuscan that was partially influenced by the Gallo-Italian languages. Florentine dialect has mandatory subject clitics.


Spoiler: Florentine clitics



io e parlo
te tu parli
lui e parla
lei la parla
noi si parla
voi vu parlate
loro e parlano
loro le parlano



In these languages the subject pronouns became mandatory clitics so the oblique strong forms started to be used as stressed subject pronouns too.
This is the situation in Lombard, Florentine, Italian, Sicilian, English.
Lü (illui) el (illum) parla. Lui e parla. Lui parla. Iḍḍu parra. He speaks.
Le (illei) la (illam) parla. Lei la parla. Lei parla. Iḍḍa parra. She speaks.
Lôr (illorum) i (illi) parla. Loro e parlano. Loro parlano. Iḍḍi parranu. They (males) speak.
Lôr (illorum) le (illae) parla. Loro le parlano. Loro parlano. Iḍḍi parranu. They (females) speak.

So some oblique forms started to be used as subject form, expecially in Gallo-Italian and in Tuscan (and then in Standard Italian).
Gallo-Italian: _mi, ti, lü, le, lôr_.
Tuscan: _te, lui, lei, loro_.
Romanesco:_ lui, lei, loro_.
Neapolitan: _lorə_.
Sicilian: none.


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## Riverplatense

Nino83 said:


> In these languages the subject pronouns became mandatory clitics so the oblique strong forms started to be used as stressed subject pronouns too.



Ladin (Badiot) is an interesting exception, it has _iö_ (strong) and _i_ (clitic) in the first person, _tö_ and _te_ in the second, _ël_ and _al_/_ëra_ and _ara_ (rhotacism) in the third person etc. However, Ladin doesn't have obligatory use of clitic pronouns: when there's a nominal or a strong pronoun, then the clitic one's omitted.

Besides it's interesting that in Old Milanese (Bonvesin, for instance) there's no trace yet of the Modern Lombard system: _mi_/_me_, _ti_/_te_ are always oblique.


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## Nino83

Riverplatense said:


> Besides it's interesting that in Old Milanese (Bonvesin, for instance) there's no trace yet of the Modern Lombard system: _mi_/_me_, _ti_/_te_ are always oblique.


According to Rohlfs in Old Lombard there were _elo (el)_ and _ela_ (_al_ and _ala_ in Old Bergamasco) but they were replaced by _lü_ and _le_.
And there was also _eo, eu_ (Old Lombard), _eo_ (Old Venetian) but they were replaced very early (as you said). In Old Milanese there is _sempre staremo mi e le in la marcé del patre me' (Barsegapé)_.
Today (at the time of Rohlfs, 1968) there is _je_ in Val Bregaglia (between Sondrio and Switzerland).


Riverplatense said:


> Ladin (Badiot) is an interesting exception


Ladin is Raetho-Romance, like Friulan.
In Friulan there are:
subject strong form: jo tu *lui* nô vô *lôr*
subject weak clitics: o tu al o o a
Friulian language - Wikipedia 
Only the oblique _lui_ and _lôr_ are used as subject, while _jo_ and_ tu_ derive from the Latin nominative forms.


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## Riverplatense

Interesting!

In Ladin the third person plural is _ëi_ and _ëres_ (strong) and _ai_ and _ares_ (clitic), so actually just analogically built plurals of the singular forms, which, however, have somewhat opaqued their origin.


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## Red Arrow

Speaking of Dutch as a dialect of German, does anyone know the history of case endings in what is nowadays called North-Western Germany? Dutch grammar cases were already doomed in the late Middle Ages. I wonder if it would have been any different if our dialects were considered "German" rather than a separate language.


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## Riverplatense

Red Arrow :D said:


> does anyone know the history of case endings in what is nowadays called North-Western Germany?



Do you talk about something substantially different from Low German with the characteristic objective (so-called «Akkudativ») and the genitive of the type _dem Mädchen ihr Buch_ (which, however, is not alien to our Bavarian dialect, neither)?


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## Nino83

@Riverplatense
I read that the difference between nominative and oblique in Low German is indicated ony by the different article (and possibly other similar determiners) in the masculine singular (de Boom, de*n* Boom, de Bööm).
Do you know if the singular form of nouns derives from the accusative/dative/oblique case or from the nominative case in Low German dialects? 
Low German - Wikipedia


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## Red Arrow

Low German - Wikipedia
Wow, this system looks a lot less 'alien' to me than Standard German.

How did they convince Low Germans to use High German grammar cases... I don't get it.


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## Riverplatense

Nino83 said:


> I read that the difference between nominative and oblique in Low German is indicated ony by the different article (and possibly other similar determiners) in the masculine singular (de Boom, de*n* Boom, de Bööm).



In the case of _Baum _it's similar in Standard German (with, however, more oblique cases), where the noun itself is declined only in the genitive form: *N* _der Baum_, *G* _des Baumes_, *D* _dem Baum_(_e _= antiquated), *A* _den Baum_. In feminine nouns it's always just the determiner to express the case: *N* _die Frau_, *G* _der Frau_, *D* _der Frau_, *A* _die Frau_.



Nino83 said:


> Do you know if the singular form of nouns derives from the accusative/dative/oblique case or from the nominative case in Low German dialects?



I think it's difficult to say, because both in Old High German and in Middle High German the nominative form mostly equalled the accusative, and it was the article to define the case. (By the way, the formal correspondence of fem. nom. and acc. [_die Frau, die Frau_] goes only for New High German, so in the past nom. and acc. were always clear, apart from, obviously, neuter nouns).

However, in the «weak» declension, nom. masc. is distinguished from acc.: *N* _der Bote_, *A* _den Boten_. In Middle High German, this is also the case with proper names. Of course, a nasal ending is quite likely to be dropped, but still I'd see this as one more hint that the forms derive from the old nominative, because the Low-German nouns don't have a final -_n_ there. Interestingly, in Middle High German there was also a N-A distinction in a «weak» feminine declension, which in Modern High German doesn't exist any more: *N*_ diu Zunge_, *A* _die Zungen_; but it does in certain dialects.


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## Nino83

Riverplatense said:


> but still I'd see this as one more hint that the forms derive from the old nominative, because the Low-German nouns don't have a final -_n_ there.


Thank you!
So now there is a question: why do southern Dutch (Flemish) nouns derive from the oblique case? French influence (I'd say no, but who knows)?


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## Red Arrow

Nino83 said:


> Thank you!
> So now there is a question: why do southern Dutch (Flemish) nouns derive from the oblique case? French influence (I'd say no, but who knows)?


That seems a bit unlikely, but it is possible. It would be like a Sprachbund. (just like Romanian / Greek / Bulgarian / Albanian, which are completely unrelated but still have many identical grammatical features)


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