@rogermue: Continuing the conversation from english.stackexchange.com/a/29946/303 : There were two reasons I didn't understand your original comment.
Firstly, I'm unfamiliar with the use of numbers to indicate case in that way. Out of interest, why is object case indicated with the number 4? What do 2 and 3 represent?
Secondly, it would made your comment a lot clearer if the quotes had been placed in quotation marks, with other words in either quotation marks or italics to indicate that they're being referred to.
So adding some quotation marks to your comment: "What 1 happened?" Not: "What 1 did happen?" - "What 1" means "what" is nominative. Question without "to do".
PS: Thank you for the suggested English exercises. However, I should point out that I'm British, and English is my first language. :-)
@SteveMelnikoff He won't get a notification unless he/she has been in the chat before. Either leave a comment inviting them to chat or get a mod to call them for you.
@rogermue @SteveMelnikoff is chatting with you here.
In latin grammar the cases are 1 nominative, 2 genitive, 3 dative, 4 accusative. If I write John1 it is nominative or subject case. John 4 is accusative or object case.
No, this use is not common. It is my way to show cases. I write a lot about languages and I do it short. Subject case and object case gets cumbersome when you have to write it five times.
@rogermue Ah - so you see my confusion. Not being familiar with your work (nor being familiar with how English is taught as a foreign language), I'd never seen this before.
@rogermue Note that when English is studied is a first language, we don't refer to cases at all, as (modern) English doesn't have them in the way that German or Latin do.
What1 is one additional sign. What (s) are 56 or six clicks on keys, you have to change from small letters to smbols to get the brackets . That is cumbersome.
That is the problem. As to who or what natives have no feeling for cases. That is the fault of teaching methods. Without a feeling for cases it is difficult to understand the system of language.
@rogermue Surely cases (in the German or Latin sense) are only relevant to languages which have them? The subject/object model is a much better fit for English.
My point was (a) it's not obvious without the explanation; and (b) as a native speaker, I don't think of English as having cases - though having studied Latin and German, I can of course understand what they mean.
@terdon On behalf of all British users, I can honestly say that that never occurred to me. :-)
Incidentally, having had a quick look around the web in the last few minutes, the consensus seems to be that English does indeed have cases - but that they are much weaker and less well defined than in many other languages.
Curious that natives think English has no cases, just because there are no endings. In English the position is a marker for cases. You always know what is subject and and object, don't you.
It's an interesting topic. All I can say is that at school, the words "subject" and "object" were used a lot, but I don't recall "case" being mentioned.
It may be to do with where you're starting from. If you're a native German speaker, then I can imagine that using the case terminology makes a lot of sense.
@rogermue Fair enough, I guessed it was your name. I just honestly read is as rogerme a few times.
Anyway, yes, I wouldn't have said that English has cases. I'd never thought of it that way. And this despite being raised a Greek/English bilingual and the former having cases.
At Cerberus, ? That is only another word for the same thing. It is useful to speak of cases in Latin, Italian, French, German, and English , too. If we use different terms for each individual language things get difficult , and it is not practical.
@rogermue That only works so long as the concept exists in all the languages we're talking about. As we've discussed, English can be regarded as having cases - so long as the student understands that English cases are different in some ways from cases in some other languages.
I know the view, English has no cases because it has no endings , it has no future because the is no ending for future tense and so on. That is a wron and narrow-minded view.
Whether you mark the case with an ending as in Latin, or with the article as in German, or with prepositions as in Italian or French or with position is irrelavant. The function that is expressed in the sentence is always the same.
@rogermue I've seen some of the arguments about English having no future tense. They strike me as being very technical, and seem to come down to precise definitions of particular linguistic terms.
@Cerberus I learned the order of the cases as: non, acc, bal, dat, gen. For Latin. Which I realize is not classical. I wonder if mine is a newer way? Also for Getman: nom, acc, dat, gen (dropping abl).
@SteveMelnikoff case is mostly useless in English except for pronouns. And even that is slowly going away: ''Between you and me'
You can arrange the cases in any order you want and yor find different arrangement in various language. But it is useful to have a standard order. I take the Latin order as used in German Grammars of Latin. We have a standard order for the letters of the alphabet and it is practical. So I have a standard order for the cases.
@Mitch I know some school books use this order, also in France, but it is not the conventional order, as you say.
@rogermue It is useful to speak of syntactical functions, such as subject, object, indirect object, adverbial phrase, etc. Those exist independently of cases and generally exist in all Indo-European languages. However, case is a morphological category; it is on a lower level than syntax. It makes sense to say that an instrument ("he killed her with a dagger) is the same syntactical category in all languages, called an instrument.
But, in Latin, it is expressed as an ablative, whereas, in Greek, it is a dative, and in German/English you have to use a preposition. It does not make sense to say that Greek has an ablative, let alone that an instrument is in the ablative case in Greek. So case and syntactical function are on different levels. It does make sense to say that English has a subject case and an object case (or nominative and accusative), but not that it has an ablative. It does have instruments, though.
Or perhaps instrument is even a semantic category rather than a syntactic category; perhaps the syntactical category here is an adverbial phrase, or a prepositional phrase.
A great case study is one done by the U.S. Census Bureau.
They found that most people came to their site looking for the current population of the United States.
So what did they do? They made a huge display box for the current population figure, setting it off with lots of fancy bordering and coloring and what have you. You literally couldn't miss it.