Case
From Encyclopædia
Case is a grammatical term used to indicate the different forms taken by a noun, pronoun, or adjective based on its function in a sentence. The use of cases is called inflection, and
languages in which they are used are called inflected
languages. Modern English has only two cases for most words: the nominative (for example, woman) and the possessive (woman's).
Old English also had an accusative case (direct object), a dative cases (indirect object), and an instrumental case (used to express means or agency). The accusative case survives in English for certain pronouns--for example: they (nominative), their (possessive), and them (accusative).Latin has six cases: nominative, genitive (possessive), dative, accusative, ablative, and vocative. The ablative case would be expressed in English by the use of prepositions such as from, with, in, and by; the vocative case is used in direct address. Among modern European
languages, German and the Slavic
tongues are highly inflected; the
romance languages and the Scandinavian
languages (except for Icelandic) are not. Case inflection is rare outside the Indo-European family of
languages. One notable exception to this is the Finno-Urgic group, which includes Finnish and Hungarian. Finnish has between 15 and 20 cases, and Hungarian has between 25 and 30.
