[B-Greek] Rationale for NGDA case-order in declension
Carl W. Conrad
cwconrad at artsci.wustl.edu
Fri Aug 1 13:00:51 EDT 2003
The rationale for the order Nom-Gen-Dat-Acc goes back, I think, to
antiquity, although I'm not sure who was its PRWTOS hEURETHS, as the Greeks
termed the discoverer or inventor of any device. It's related to the very
word "case" which itself derives from Lat. CASUS (from the verb CADO
"fall"), which Latin term derives further from Grk PTWSIS, from the verb
PIPTW "fall." One must understand, the way I was taught it, a "fall" from a
vertical to a horizontal position, as follows (best I can do with ASCII
characters, the angles really should space out equally between the vertical
and horizontal:
The idea is that the Nominative and Accusative are CASUS RECTI (ORQAI
PTWSEIS) or "rectangular/right-angle cases" while the Genitive and Dative
are CASUS OBLIQUI (LOXAI PTWSEIS?); in fact there are similarities between
Nom. & Acc. as a group and between Gen. & Dat. as a group, when one
considers some of the factors: in the singular the vowel is long in 1st &
2nd decl nouns in the gen. and sg., while in 3d decl. monosyllabic stems it
is the ending syllable that is accented in Gen. & Dat.; the endings of the
old dual were identical in Nom & Acc and in Gen & Dat. At any rate, that IS
the rationale for the traditional case-sequence. The order NAGD simply puts
the "rectilinear" cases first and then does the "oblique cases."
|Nominative
|
| /Genitive
| /
| / /Dative
|/ /
|__/_______Accusative
At 4:14 PM +0100 8/1/03, bgreek at ranulf.net wrote:
>Hi all,
>
>>From what I've seen (I'm in the UK), I'd expect NAGD to be the popular
>form, and in fact NGDA just seems plain weird to me!
>
>Having learnt Latin at school about 14 years ago, we definitely had
>"nom. acc. gen. dat. abl." drilled into us. Since the ablative isn't
>used in Greek (or rather its uses have been moved to other cases),
>I'd expect Greek to be nom, acc, gen, dat and my current text book,
>Wenham, also uses this. I hadn't even noticed that other people *did*
>it differently until today!
>
>I can't see, though, the rationale for putting accusative last, as
>its use is presumably far more common that genitive and dative.
>
>I happened to be glancing at a modern Greek text book this lunchtime,
>and that certainly taught NAG as the order, noting that dative has fallen
>out of common use except for a few words, and the ending -Hi has generally
>been replaced by -EI(S) in these few words. Presumably similarly for -Wi,
>although all the examples cited were -EI.
>
>Ranulf Doswell, UK
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--
Carl W. Conrad
Department of Classics, Washington University (Emeritus)
1989 Grindstaff Road/Burnsville, NC 28714/(828) 675-4243
cwconrad at artsci.wustl.edu
WWW: http://www.ioa.com/~cwconrad/
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