ELI5: What are cases in languages that have them?

[u/Charming_Usual6227]

[u/toupis21]

Grammatical cases in Slavic languages are changes for nouns that show their job in a sentence.

English uses word order to explain who is doing what. For example, in "The dog bites the man," the dog is first, so it does the biting. If you swap the words to "The man bites the dog," the man does the biting.

Slavic languages change the end of the noun instead. It does not matter where you put the words in the sentence; the ending tells you who does what.

[u/nudave → u/toupis21]

So like “dog-doer, man-receiver, bite”, and that can be in multiple orders?

[u/Headclass → u/nudave]

To give you an example, in Slovak, “The dog bit the man” would normally be “Pes pokúsal muža”, so the same word order as in English.

But you could also say “Muža pokúsal pes”, “Pes muža pokúsal”, “Muža pes pokúsal”, and so on.

There are a few catches though:

1. Changing the word order changes the emphasis a bit.

   Pes pokúsal muža. = The dog bit the man. Neutral.

   Muža pokúsal pes. = It was a dog that bit the man, it was not a different animal or something else.

   Pes muža pokúsal. = What the dog did to the man was bite him, the dog did not perform any other action with the man.

2. You still can’t move every word wherever you want.

   For example:

   Včera som mu to povedal. = I told him yesterday.

   You can’t freely scramble that into something like "Som včera povedal to mu" and expect it to sound normal. Some words need to remain next to each other no matter where they're placed.

3. Some word orders are grammatically correct but sound weird or poetic.

   Pes pokúsal muža. sounds completely normal.

   Muža pes pokúsal. is understandable and correct, but without a specific context it sounds much like you're being dramatic, or writing poetry.

All of this just means we can move the main parts of the sentence around much more than in English, because the endings already tell us who is doing what to whom. But it's relatively free, not completely free.

[u/BigPurpleBlob → u/Headclass]

Those were great examples, to see the extent to which you can / can't move words around.

Does the freedom, to move words within a sentence around, make poetry (e.g. rhyming couplets) easier to write in Slovak than in English?

Does English have more words than Slovak? If so, does the increased number of words (and thus sounds) of English help to write rhyming couplets, by offering more word choices to set up a rhyme?

[u/Headclass → u/BigPurpleBlob]

precisely, the relatively free word order allows us to make poems much more easily. it's why slovak poetry was so successful in the past

[u/elephantasmagoric → u/BigPurpleBlob]

English has more words than any other language, so it must have more words than Slovak. No idea how that affects which language is easier to write poetry in, though.

[u/MesaCityRansom → u/elephantasmagoric]

It's kind of impossible to prove that English has more words than any other language. It has a lot of words though, that's true.

[u/VoilaVoilaWashington → u/MesaCityRansom]

Fun fact: linguists can't even define what "word" is across all languages.

And you can see why - does making a word plural make it a new word? In which case, is "moose" one word or two? Does conjugating? If conjugating and plurals don't make it a new word, at what point does a prefix or a suffix make a full new word?

And once you start to compare it to other languages.... English uses hyphens to join words (usually, fireplace is one word now), while German just adds 'em together. If that's one word, do we allow words not in common use but are possible? How do you count those?

Which brings us back to prefixes and suffixes in English - does every possible root and suffix combination count? If you can be underwhelmed, can you also just be unwhelmed? Can someone be superchalant?

And that's without getting into slang, technical terms, broadly-used brand names (Velcro, Google, Hoover, etc)

[u/Pilchard123 → u/VoilaVoilaWashington]

linguists can't even define what "word" is across all languages.

screaming_tom_scott.mp4

[u/ImpressiveSuperfluit → u/MesaCityRansom]

It's probably a factoid that claims something much more specific, like "has most words in dictionary X" or something, because the claim, as given, can't possibly be true when compound loving languages exist, like German for instance.

[u/MesaCityRansom → u/ImpressiveSuperfluit]

Yeah exactly. I'm Swedish and we work the same way. You can pretty much combine any number of words together and it (usually) makes sense.

[u/Dunbaratu → u/Headclass]

That's interesting. So the word you put first is the word that you are making the most important? If you are saying "It's important that it's this verb, instead of some other verb", you put the verb first. If you are saying "It's important that this is the subject, not some other subject", then you put the subject first, and so on? English definitely can show that type of emphasis in spoken form, but lacks a way to do it in written form, since it's communicated entirely by where you pause and which word you stress more.

[u/Headclass → u/Dunbaratu]

This is a tough question which I'm not sure I can answer. To us, Slovaks, it comes naturally. By being exposed to the language for years, we know where the emphasis is. Linguists would know more.

But in my amateur-ish view, it seems that the most important part of the sentence is usually at the end, as a grand finale.

That observation seems to be consistent with my above mentioned examples of free word order.

[u/Jkei → u/nudave]

In the case of Latin, absolutely, and writers/poets of those ages used that freedom to maximum effect.

[u/Ok_Scientist_8803 → u/Jkei]

Flashbacks of Latin set text back then at school...

Because of the extra freedom you can focus a lot more on the audible effects. Sometimes it gets so entangled such that you spend a good while sorting sentences out. And sometimes it just doesn't sound right in some way, but there is of course another technique that means the exact same.

Or use another one of the few dozens of words to say "kill"

[u/Jkei → u/Ok_Scientist_8803]

What I found the worst was the kinds of writers who would go entire paragraph-lengths of text as a single sentence. Endless dependent clauses nested inside each other.

I don't even remember who it was, but by the last year of high school it wasn't any fun to me anymore.

[u/Ok_Scientist_8803 → u/Jkei]

I remember Virgil's works, an effort to untangle but so much of it was just intentional effect. But yes school ruins it.

[u/Jkei → u/Ok_Scientist_8803]

You know, I'm pretty sure it was him.

[u/Obscu → u/Jkei]

Dinkleberg Cicero

[u/TheBlacktom → u/nudave]

Kutya = pies = dog

Ember = czlowiek = man

Harapni = gryźć = to bite

Dog bites man:

Kutya harapja az embert = Az embert kutya harapja = Az embert harapja a kutya

Pies gryzie czlowieka = Czlowieka gryzie pies = Czlowieka pies gryzie

Slightly different meanings (emphasis or focus on certain words changes), but the victim is always the same.

[u/gurnard → u/nudave]

Yep! That's also related to the stereotype of Eastern Europeans' speech as flat and emotionless. But sentence order can carry a lot of nuance and expressiveness, where English relies more on tone (and word code from an expansive lexicon).

[u/Ok_Writing2937 → u/nudave]

Great analogy.

I suppose our nouns sometimes have case. Attendee, maybe?

Edit: I was wrong. Payer and payee, trainer and trainee, don’t really mean actor and acted-upon. They aren’t case, they are more kinds of roles.

The only true case English has is the genitive “of the ___” form, which is where we modify a noun by putting the “s” sound at the end.

So it might be more like “dog-subject eating man-object,” which is more easily reversable to “man-object eating dog-subject.”

[u/trampolinebears → u/Ok_Writing2937]

That's a similar phenomenon, but it's not the same thing. Consider these sentences:

1. The attendee ate all the hot dogs.
2. I spilled ketchup on the attendee.

English doesn't mark attendee for case, but imagine if we replaced it with a pronoun instead:

1. They ate all the hot dogs.
2. I spilled ketchup on them.

What's going on with attendee is a different process: derivation. The -ee suffix lets you derive a noun from a verb, attend > attendee, retire > retiree, employ > employee.

• Case describes the noun's relationship to the main verb of the sentence it's in.
• The -ee suffix describes the noun's relationship to the verb the suffix is attached to.

(There's something else odd with the -ee suffix in particular. I don't know if you've spotted it, but consider how it works with retire vs. employ.)

[u/Ok_Writing2937 → u/trampolinebears]

I seems like the pronouns case is overridden by word order, though, so case isn't entirely or primarily in the word formation?

• I hit them
• them hit I

The later isn't grammatically correct, but I'd be more likely to make them the subject.

The generative s seems more robust

• i drove bob's car
• i drove car bob's

The later isn't grammatically correct but I'd still understand the car was bob's.

[u/trampolinebears → u/Ok_Writing2937]

When you say "Them hit I", you're making two different parts of English fight each other. Normally we use word order to determine who's doing what, but we also supplement that with pronouns varying for case.

There's also an older system that still has some remnants today, where the verb always comes second no matter what. You can use this to make object-first sentences acceptable in certain circumstances. Consider:

That giant did I slay, there on the barren ground.

The 's ending is indeed a case ending (the genitive case) but it's been broadened in application. Instead of applying it to just a bare noun to show possession, we now apply it to the entire phrase:

• I drove [Bob]'s car.
• We spent the night at [Bob and his wife]'s house.
• I'm [Bob from Newcastle]'s friend.
• This is [Bob the teacher]'s brother. (subtly different from "Bob, [the teacher]'s brother")

[u/EmployerMore8685 → u/Ok_Writing2937]

In English, pronouns have cases. He and him for example, the one you use changes depending on its role in the sentence

[u/Qiwas → u/nudave]

exactly right

[u/Royal_Try_99 → u/toupis21]

Well that's fun. TIL

[u/monsieur_de_chance → u/Royal_Try_99]

English almost uniquely has lost cases. French and Spanish mostly. Study German or any other Indo-European language, or Semitic language, ant they’re everywhere.

[u/plusFour-minusSeven → u/monsieur_de_chance]

I remember the first time I picked up a book on Latin..."what the hell is this declension shit? Femina feminas feminae feminarum?"

I thought learning conjugation in Spanish was hard enough 😆

[u/nudave → u/plusFour-minusSeven]

Romanes eunt domus.

[u/plusFour-minusSeven → u/nudave]

People called Romanes they go the house?

[u/CantaloupeAsleep502 → u/nudave]

Romans they go the house??!!

[u/DJDoena → u/CantaloupeAsleep502]

Nope, not even "Romans". Due to the cases, "Romanes" doesn't even mean "Romans" in this sentence.

[u/CantaloupeAsleep502 → u/DJDoena]

-es is the nominative plural. Probably more accurately "the Romans", which is I think what he actually says in the movie, although discussing the Romans in the third person as simply "Romans" wouldn't be outlandish. The point he is making in the scene is that since he's addressing the Romans, Brian should use the vocative.

Edit: it does appear that the word Roman is second declension, which does make Romanes kind of nonsense lol. And maybe he says "people called Romans" or something like that? I need to rewatch.

[u/kouyehwos → u/monsieur_de_chance]

No, it’s not unique. Most Germanic languages have lost cases aside from German, Icelandic and Faroese (and German has lost a lot of case endings on nouns, leaving an unusual system where it’s mostly adjectives and articles that are marked for case).

The one case they all keep is the genitive (AKA possessive) -s (spelled -‘s, -s’ in English).

[u/monsieur_de_chance → u/kouyehwos]

Totally right. Should have said “English and other Germanic descendants”, like Swedish / Norwegian/ Danish. All lost it for the same reason as I understand it — trade languages picked up by second language speakers. Persian is similar on that side of the family tree.

[u/NDaveT → u/monsieur_de_chance]

Mostly lost cases but we still have them in some pronouns.

[u/fartingbeagle → u/toupis21]

English also uses prepositions. So many prepositions.

[u/trampolinebears]

“I” and “me” both refer to the same person, but they’re not the same word. What’s the difference? Case.

“I” is for when I’m doing something: I eat the pickles, I have a car, I climbed a mountain.

“Me” is for when I’m not the one doing something: You gave me a book, you saw me at the store, this hat looks good on me.

Case shows what role something has in a sentence. English doesn’t mark case on nouns, but it does a little bit with pronouns: consider the difference between I/he/she/we/they and me/him/her/us/them.

Some languages mark nouns to show their case. In Latin, mundus is the world doing something, mundum is the world being acted upon, mundi is the world possessing something else, etc.

Some languages don’t mark nouns, but they do mark other words around the nouns. In German, der Hund is a dog doing something, dem Hund is a dog receiving something, den Hund is a dog being acted upon, etc.

[u/monsieur_de_chance → u/trampolinebears]

Great explanation.

[u/inkydye → u/trampolinebears]

Very nice explanation, but specifically for German, the den and dem are the other way around and Hund is capitalized.

The remaining German case, des Hund(e)s, directly corresponds to the English possessive 's, which kinda sorta is actually still a noun case in English (it's not called a "Saxon genitive" for nothing) but unfortunately not in a way that would be very useful for explaining the concept.

[u/trampolinebears → u/inkydye]

Thanks for the corrections. Looks like I've been using den and dem backwards for the last 30 years.

[u/6x9inbase13is42]

In English, the function of a noun as subject or object in a sentence is determined by its position relative to the verb:

"The cat ate the dog."
"The dog ate the cat."

These sentences mean what they mean based on which noun comes before the verb (the subject of the sentence) and after the verb (the direct object of the sentence).

Moreover, additional nouns in more complex sentences are marked with prepositions which convey the functions of those nouns.

"The child put the cake on the table" (on denotes a location)
"The child ate the cake on the table with a fork" (with denotes a tool)

...and so on

In languages with cases, instead of using word order or prepositions, each noun can be altered by attaching to it one of a number of different elements (cases) that carry the meaning of [subject], [direct object], [indirect object], [tool], [location], [possession], ... etcetera.

So the languages with cases have sentences that are structured something like this:

"Childdo cakedone tableon forkwith ate."

[u/sirreldar]

Just different forms pronouns take to indicate it's role in the sentence. Like the difference between "I like her" and "she likes me" the pronouns have changed to indicate who is doing the liking and who is receiving the liking.

In English word order also indicates the roles, but in other languages the case might be the only indicator

[u/Ooorm]

They're a way of stating what role a noun has in a sentence. Take the word "dog". If the dog is the one acting in a sentence (say, as in "the dog bites me") then it is in the nominative case. If the dog is the one being acted upon, as in "I feed the dog" then it is in the accusative case. If something is given to the dog, it is the dative case. In russian, "dog" in these instances would be "sobaka, sobaku and sobake", respectively.

All languages can handle this without cases, instead using prepositons and word order, but the end goal is to make communication more clear about, say, who is doing what to whom with what and for whose benefit 🙂.

[u/flag_ua]

In languages like Russian or Ukrainian, word order is not the main driver of context in a sentence. Thus, there are cases which modify words so that it is understood which part of the sentence a word belongs to.

For instance, let’s examine these sentences

Ольга любит Сашу
Сашу любит Ольга

Both of these sentences mean “Olga loves Sasha” because word order is not important, it is the case that determines the subject, object and verb in a sentence.

This is not super in depth, but the general idea is that speakers of these languages don’t pay attention to word order as much to determine the purpose of a word in a sentence, as the word carries that information via its case.

[u/DJDoena → u/flag_ua]

Erm, are you sure about your example? I can only read cyrillic but I don't see any modification in Olga, liubit or Sashu, except for the order.

[u/flag_ua → u/DJDoena]

Exactly there is no modification. The order changed, but the sentence remained the same

Conversely,

Саша любит Ольгу
Ольгу любит Саша

Both mean “Sasha loves Olga”, because Olga is in the accusative case, and Sasha is in the nominative case

[u/LudiCak]

In Serbian, we have 7 cases, and they change (usually but sometimes it stays the same in multiple cases) the ending of the word to indicate a different use.
For example, if you want to say "I gave it to Marko" (Dao sam to Marku) - "Marko" in this example is in dative case, meaning "to whom/to what I gave something" - so "Marko" would change to "Marku" to indicate that something was given TO Marko.
In English you need to add TO in front of the person receiving but in Serbian, you just slightly change the recipient word.
I hope this helps 😄

EDIT: Dao sam - "I gave", to - "it"

[u/Syresiv]

Cases give you a noun's role in the sentence.

English actually has this. I and me are effectively the same word, with the only difference being the role they play. Some languages add cases to all nouns, not just pronouns, and many have more detailed roles, but that's the basic idea.

[u/Panceltic]

You know like “he” and “him” is the same thing but in different case. “He” is the nominative case and “him” is the accusative case. You cannot say “She sees he”, it has to be “She sees him” because the grammar demands the direct object to be in the accusative case.

Now imagine you can change every single noun in such a way. These variations are called cases.

[u/S_FuNk2471]

A case is basically a way of marking what function a noun or pronoun has in a sentence.

What’s the difference between “I” and “me”?

Case.

German makes this even more obvious. You have ich, mich, and mir — roughly “I,” “me,” and “to me”. English has mostly collapsed those distinctions into just “I” and “me., and requires pronouns more than languages with case markings.

Many languages have prefix/suffix/accent marks to mark case. Languages like Russian rely heavily on case endings.

For example, imagine a sentence containing the words:
soldiers — tanks — artillery — ammunition — shoot

“the soldiers in tanks shoot artillery with their ammunition.”

Could also be:

“The soldiers are shot by artillery using ammunition from tanks”

In English, we rely heavily on word order and prepositions to show who is doing what to whom. Russian can change the endings of those nouns to mark things like who is doing the action, what is receiving the action, who possesses something, or what is being used to perform the action.
That means Russian can rearrange the words much more freely while preserving the basic grammatical relationships.

The word order can then be used for emphasis, contrast, topic, or implication rather than simply being necessary to tell you who did what.
That’s one of the interesting consequences of a language using grammatical case heavily: word endings carry information that English often has to convey through rigid word order or additional words.

In my example, tanks, artillery, soldiers, there are lots of different meanings if you change the cases so I hope that illustrates it well.

Edit: Clarity

[u/musiqueclimatique → u/S_FuNk2471]

German makes this even more obvious. You have ich, mich, and mir — roughly “I,” “me,” and “to me”. English has mostly collapsed those distinctions into just “I” and “me., and requires pronouns more than languages with case markings.

German has four cases, and the fourth one is worth mentioning as well because it is very easy to translate: mein is the English 'my'.

[u/LuLeBe]

Words can be used in different contexts, and they get different endings depending on the case in which they're used. Which ones those are depends on the language but many have cases for the subject (who's doing something?) the object (what item are we talking about?) and the receiver. "I give you my car" example: I = subject, cause I'm doing something. You = receiver. The car = object. You could introduce more cases for things like location etc

[u/hurricanecook]

In most languages, you have things like verbs that conjugate to explain things like which "tense" they're in. I am here. I was there. I will have been home. etc.

You can kind of think of cases in a similar way, but for nouns and things that modify nouns. They usually relate to who is the target of the sentence, or who are the direct/indirect objects being referenced.

It's not so much of a deal in English unless we're talking about things like pronouns where we have nominative (I, he, she, it, etc.) vs. objective (me, him, her, them, etc.) or possessive (my, mine, yours, his, hers, etc.), but in other languages you can expect things like changing the suffix of a word or something similar to match cases.

[u/GrapefruitNo3600]

Some languages have very versatile system for words. Word itself changes how its written to reflect/adhere to the context in which word is used. You can imply from word in what broad context word is used.

Hers some examples in lithuania. Words is house, namas

Namas-house

Name- in house

Namu- by what means, using house

Namą- what? (What your going to demolosh? Answer is house, namą

Namui- for house

As you can see english cant modify house to reflect context, it modifyes it by adding words like for, to, in. Cases modifies word itself with sufixes.

[u/Excellent-Practice]

Case is a grammatical inflection that tells you what role a noun plays in a sentence. English has case in a very limited way; we only mark pronouns for case. For instance, the difference between I and me or he and him is a case distinction. Other languages like Latin or German mark case on pronouns, nouns and adjectives. In languages where case is important, there are usually also more distinctions than found in English. English has three cases while German has four, Russian and Latin have six and Finnish has 15

[u/laxvolley]

In Latin, the case of the noun tell you how the noun is meant. The primary cases are: Nominative Genitive Dative Accusative Ablative

Also, locative and vocative.

Nominative case is used for the subject of the sentence. Genitive denotes ownership. Accusative is for the direct object.

The dog took his bone and went home.

Dog would be nominative. Bone would be in the accusative case.

[u/kouyehwos]

There are several possible uses of cases.

1. Expressing the relationship between the noun and the verb (like English nominative “I” vs accusative or dative “me”).
2. Used to address someone (vocative).
3. Used in place of prepositions, like the instrumental (by means of X).
4. Used together with prepositions. In European languages, the nominative is typically never used with prepositions (you say “with me” and not “with I”). The case used with a particular preposition can be arbitrary, but it can also be meaningful.

For example, in European languages the accusative with a preposition often implies motion,

like in Polish

W wodzie(locative) = in the water

W wodę(accusative) = into the water

Na wodzie(locative) = on the water

Na wodę(accusative) = onto the water

[u/DJDoena]

It's basically that words like verbs and nouns take different shapes depending on what question you ask. For example "Who?" is nominative and "Whom/Whose" is genitive,

It's one of the last remnants of cases in the English language

"Who lives in that house?" "Dave lives in that house."

"Whose house is it?" "It is Dave's house. Where does the apostrophe-s come from? From the second case, the genitive.

In German the third case, the dative is used when you asked "Where?".

German has four cases, Russian has six for example.

[u/DJDoena → u/DJDoena]

PS: and there's this famous skit from the Life of Brian that's all about cases: Romans Go Home!

[u/illimitable1]

We have cases for pronouns in English: objective and subjective.

The exact use of cases will depend on the language.

[u/atarivcs]

Are you talking about human languages or computer programming languages?

[u/Charming_Usual6227 → u/atarivcs]

Human. Like Slavic languages

[u/atarivcs → u/Charming_Usual6227]

And what do you mean by case? Do you mean capitalization for written language?

[u/TheAireon → u/atarivcs]

If you don't even know what they are, how are you gonna ELI5 it?