Greek Case Forms
Carl Conrad
cwconrad at artsci.wustl.edu
Mon Apr 26 09:13:06 EDT 1999
On 04/26/99, ""Jay Adkins" <JAdkins264 at aol.com>" wrote:
> Dear B-Greekers,
I had read recently that "Greek originally had ablative, locative and
instrumental case forms." and that "the eventual squeezing out of the
dative case begun during the Hellenistic period." So, can someone tell me
if modern Greek still uses the dative case at all and what exactly are the
cases used in modern Greek? Is this pairing down due to increasing use of
prepositions? Or is it just the simplification of the language?
The Demotic Modern Greek uses the genitive case for the ancient dative of
indirect object, while the locative and instrumental functions are all, I
think, expressed with prepositions and the accusative. Of course the dative
is retained in the Katharevousa such as written by our new Brazilian
friends Costa and Navarro, but the Katharevousa is a sort of revived
polished Koine used more for writing than for spoken communication.
Is for causal factors, I'm not sure that linguistic change can ever be
explained in terms of a single factor like paring down, but the increasing
use of prepositions with the accusative is surely a major factor in the
loss of the dative in Modern Demotic. Other factors at work in the ancient
fusion of locative, dative, and instrumental into the historical dative
must include, I think, (a) shared or similar endings for different original
cases, and (b) a perception of overlapping functions of different original
cases. I think this second factor is perhaps more evident as an explanation
for fusion of the PIE ablative, partitive, and genitive cases into the
ancient Greek genitive ("from"--"part of"--"belonging to" respectively).
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