Good day, all!
Read through....the question is at the end.
English cases, though no longer taught as such, are still somewhat
present and remnants of the cases in Old English. During the time
between say, 1300 and the present, we lost most of the inflections that
were present before 1300, but some of the words -- particularly the
possessive pronouns -- retained their inflections.
The four cases of Old English are:
Nominative
Genative
Accusative
Dative/Instrumental
The Nominative case gets its name from the idea that it is the 'naming'
case. It identifies the subject of the sentence by name.
The Genative case gets its name by pointing out the 'genesis' of the
noun. "Brother of mine", "Goblet of silver". Generally,
anywhere 'of' is used, the object of the preposition will be in the
Genative case.
Now Accusative and Dative leave me baffled. How did they get their names?
Accusative seems to bring to mind one accusing another. Even in Russian,
Винительный (vi-NI-tyl-ni) is the name of the Accusative case and the root verb of that is
Винить (vi-NIT),
to blame, accuse. But how does that apply to the case of a noun
in the general role of Direct Object? Or is the premise of
Accusative case being equivalent to the Direct Object faulty altogether?
Dative conjures in me the idea of dates. In linguistics, the
Dative case is generally used to indicate the Indirect Object.
The question becomes, "how/where does the concept of date intersect
with the idea of Indirect Object?
Now naturally there are prepositions that require a specific
case. In English all prepositions require the Accusative case
(the Dative case seems all but lost in Modern English). In German
hilfen,
to help, requires the Dative, whereas
sehen,
to see,
requires an Accusative object. Whereas this makes perfect sense,
there are other that make no sense. This is not the thread for
that discussion.
My question, after all that, is this:
Where did the different grammatical cases get there names?
Thanks!