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There is a tendency in Germanic and Romance languages that the number of the grammatical cases is decreasing.

The Indo-European proto-language should have 8 grammatical cases, in Latin we already have only 7, in modern German 4, in English only 2...

What is suprising for me, the declension of the language was firstly becoming more and more complicated, and then there was a decrease. What have caused such phenomenon?

hippietrail
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Stepan Vihor
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    What are the two cases in English? By the way, you might want to specify "grammatical cases": every languages has cases, but some show them, others use prepositions. – Alenanno Jun 11 '12 at 15:01
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    What makes you think case is the only marker of a language becoming more/less complicated? – Joe Jun 11 '12 at 16:36
  • @alenanno, did you mean morphological cases? – kaleissin Jun 11 '12 at 17:24
  • @kaleissin I meant Grammatical cases (not sure if what you said is a more technical term?) like nominative, genitive, dative, etc... – Alenanno Jun 11 '12 at 17:25
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    @alenanno and I meant cases (nominative, genitive etc.) somehow explicitly marked on the word itself. Syntax not always == morphology. Hm, that needs its own symbol, really. – kaleissin Jun 11 '12 at 19:01
  • @kaleissin We were talking about the same thing. But whether you use grammatical cases, or you express it with prepositions, all languages have cases. I mean, "I eat an apple", "an apple" does not change but it's still a Direct Object, typically expressed by the Accusative. – Alenanno Jun 11 '12 at 19:50
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    I wouldn't say it's necessarily true that all languages have cases. The term "case" seems to have a more specific meaning relating to nominal inflections and a more general, less common extended sense that also covers adpositions in languages where nouns don't inflect etc. But I think there must be a better word for these "semantic roles" that all languages have. I know in Georgian there is a non 1:1 mapping between semantic roles and cases. The subject can be in nominal or ergative case, the object can be in dative or nominal case - and there are some other less common possibilities too! – hippietrail Jun 11 '12 at 19:50
  • @hippietrail True, but we are not talking about correspondences. Even if Russian uses the Genitive for the Masculine Animated nouns in the accusative, it still uses cases. I'm saying that, regardless of the correspondence between languages, all languages have "cases", some grammatical, others not. – Alenanno Jun 11 '12 at 19:51
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    I want to be clear to say that a) I believe semantic roles and cases are too independent things. Also b) There's probably a more standard term than "semantic roles" but that seems to be a straightforward way to say what I'm thinking. – hippietrail Jun 11 '12 at 19:52
  • @Alenanno: I'm saying that those either shouldn't be called cases when being technical, or we should be very careful that "case" has two different but overlapping senses. ... But I defer to the real linguists since I'm just a hobbyist ... – hippietrail Jun 11 '12 at 19:53
  • @Alenanno Hippie is right, the term 'case' in linguistics refers to morphological inflections on nouns. But the term is also used to refer to abstract case, ie. the semantic role of a NP whether marked by case inflections, adpositions, syntax, whatever. One way to avoid ambiguity is to call the former 'case-marking'. – Gaston Ümlaut Jun 12 '12 at 00:09
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    Are they decreasing? They have decreased, but I don't see any progress currently in any Germanic or Romance languages. – Mitch Jun 12 '12 at 02:31
  • @kaleissin I don't think English explictly marks cases at all. They are marked implicitly though word order. From what I remember, nor does French (a romance langauge). Then again, when I think explicit marking I think of a system of lexical case markers such as in Korean or Japanese. – acattle Jun 12 '12 at 03:35
  • Tes, I've meant grammatical cases, and the complication of the declension itself – Stepan Vihor Jun 12 '12 at 07:19
  • English has nominative/accusative marking on personal pronouns only, or maybe it should better be called subject/object marking as it usually is - again I defer to real linguists. Then there is the English possessive which some people do not distinguish from a genetive case, but I believe linguists have decided that the modern English possessive is no longer a genetive case. – hippietrail Jun 12 '12 at 07:29
  • @GastonÜmlaut Uhm maybe I explained myself the wrong way. I agree with that. I'm just saying that, say, in Italian for example, if I say "Parlo a John" (I talk to John), "a John" would be expressed by the Dative case, but I know that it's not technically a dative, because Italian has prepositions. In any case, the phrase there answers to a question that usually the dative takes care of. – Alenanno Jun 12 '12 at 08:26
  • Oh by the way, as far as I know English marks only one case, as a remnant, and it's "whom"... It should be a Dative? I am not sure now. – Alenanno Jun 12 '12 at 08:28
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    @Alenanno: I SUB me OBJ my POS; you SUB+OBJ your POS; he SUB him OBJ his POS; she SUB her OBJ+POS; it SUB+OBJ its POS; we SUB us OBJ our POS; they SUB them OBJ their POS and the archaisms thou SUB thee OBJ thy POS. I would say whom is also OBJ since it would be used for both ACC and DAT. – hippietrail Jun 12 '12 at 08:44
  • @StepanVihor: *Grammatical cases* might not be much less ambiguous than *cases* since semantics is taken into account to a degree as well as inflection. kaleissin suggested the better term *morphological cases. Looking around on Wikipedia I think that term would be opposed to both thematic relation* and *theta role*. – hippietrail Jun 12 '12 at 10:49

1 Answers1

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As I understand, it's not that these languages are forever on a downward trend with respect to case markings, but rather that these things are cyclical. In general, languages seem to cycle between analytical (few morphological cases, as the question is concerned) and synthetic (many cases) over long spans of time. This happens as children analyze speech in slightly different ways than the adults they are exposed to. A quick example of this happening in earlier English is the word napron. Adults referred to it as a napron, and now we know it as an apron.

You can find more about this by searching on terms linguistic cycle, grammaticalization and reanalysis.

It should be noted that languages with robust case systems are not "better" at expressing ideas than those with sparse case systems. In English, for example, we can express the same ideas for which other languages require case markings by adding other words (generally prepositions).

Tim Gorichanaz
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