[B-Greek] 8 cases originally
Stephen C. Carlson
scarlson at mindspring.com
Tue Jun 21 00:00:16 EDT 2005
At 07:21 PM 6/20/2005 -0700, Mitch Larramore wrote:
>What is the debate about, if these two
>statements have been verified?
This information comes from Sihler's New Comparative
Grammar of Greek and Latin (pp. 250-251).
The 8-case system is a feature of Indo-European, the
language from which Greek descends. Even in IE, the
ablative was nearly identical to the genitive in the
singular (except for o-stems) and identical to the
dative in the plural. By the time IE developed into
Greek, the ablative was probably already wholly
replaced by the genitive in both the singular and
plural, but there is some evidence that Mycenaean
Greek (Linear B, pre-Homer) still distinguished
the dative, locative, and instrumental cases.
Stephen Carlson
--
Stephen C. Carlson mailto:scarlson at mindspring.com
Weblog: http://www.hypotyposeis.org/weblog/
"Poetry speaks of aspirations, and songs chant the words." Shujing 2.35
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