✧ Russian grammar - Cases ✧
В начале весны, гуляя по парку, вы порой можете увидеть бабочку.
· Russian is one of the many languages that is based on grammatical cases, which express the role or function of a word within a sentence by changing the ending of said word.
The word 'case' comes from the Latin casus, derived from the verb cadere, which in turn is a calque of the Greek πτῶσις ('falling'), as it is considered that other cases "fall" from the nominative, that is, the standard form of a word. The Russian word for 'case', падеж, follows the same etymology: it's related to the word падать ('to fall').
· Languages like English usually indicate the function or a word through word order and prepositions. For example, in "the dog sees the cat", we know that "the dog" is the subject and "the cat" is the direct object because of the Subject-Verb-Object (or SVO) order. If we were to inverse the position of the nouns, their functions would change as well: in "the cat sees the dog", "the cat" is now the subject and "the dog" is the direct object.
· In Russian, however, it is possible to change the position of the nouns without changing the meaning of the sentence, as grammatical functions are indicated through ending changes, that is, cases. As such, the sentences "собака видит кошку", "кошку собака видит", "кошку видит собака" all mean "the dog sees the cat", as "dog" (собака) is in the nominative, which often expresses the subject, and "cat" (кошка) is in the accusative (кошку), which often expresses the direct object. This does not mean that Russian word order is free of rules, but it is certainly more flexible than English or Spanish, for example.
As a fun fact, Romance languages and languages like English do have remains of grammatical cases in personal pronouns - notice how, for example, "he" changes when it's not the subject, like "he sees the cat" but "the cat sees him".
· Another point to keep in mind is that the existence of cases means that Russian has specific endings tied to specific word classes. For example, the -ая/-яя feminine ending indicates that the word is an adjective or adjective-like word, like adjectival nouns and adjectival participles, and the declination will be the same for all of these words. As such, новая (adjective), учёная (adjectival noun) and читающая (adjectival participle) all share the same type of endings. Meanwhile, words in consonant + -а/-я decline like feminine nouns, regardless of the actual gender of the word, and thus дядя ("uncle") and тётя ("tía") will follow the same declination rules.
· Compare this to English or Spanish, where you can't distinguish nouns from adjectives unless they have a suffix. "King" and "long" both end in -ng, but one is a noun and the other is an adjective. Similarly, there's no way to distinguish the word class of "alta" and "nota", unless you know it by heart. Meanwhile, these words would be in Russian король, длинний, высокая and нота, where -ий and -ая are for adjectives, and ль and consonant + а are for nouns. It is however not an absolute rule, as some nouns end in -ий and some adjectives in consonant + а, for example, but it's much easier to tell the class of a word in Russian based on the ending.
· Modern Russian has 6 cases: the nominative, the accusative, the genitive, the dative, the instrumental and the prepositional - a lot for Russian learners, but fewer than old Indo-European languages. Besides these 6, there are a few "hidden" cases that are rarely taught in Russian courses, since they only apply to a limited number of nouns; two of the most common ones are the vocative and the locative.
· Because these six cases are meant to express the wide variety of grammatical functions that one word can have, each has many uses, but at their very core, this is what each of them indicates:
Nominative: the subject. The Russian name, именительный, comes from имя (‘name’) and именовать (‘to name’).
Genitive: possession of another noun. The Russian name, родительный, comes from род (‘origin’), and родить, (‘to give birth’); calque of the English ‘genitive’, from Latin genus (‘origin’) and gigno (‘to be born’).
Dative: the indirect object. The Russian name, дательный, comes from дать (‘to give’); calque of the English ‘dative’, from Latin datus (‘given’).
Accusative: the direct object. The Russian name, винительный, comes from винить (‘to accuse’); calque of the English ‘accusative’.
Instrumental: the means or tool to do an action. The Russian name, творительный, comes from творить (‘to create’).
Prepositional: placement of a noun, always after a preposition. The Russian name, предложный, comes from предлог (‘preposition’).
· Lastly, not all words have cases in Russian:
Words that have cases: nouns, adjectives, pronouns, participles, and numerals.
Words that don't have cases: adverbs, verbs, gerunds, prepositions, conjunctions, and particles.
· The sentence under the gif contains all cases:
В начале (prepositional) весны (genitive), гуляя по парку (dative), вы (nominative) порой (instrumental) можете увидеть бабочку (accusative). - At the beginning of spring, while walking through the park, you might occasionally see a butterfly.
