ABSTRACT
In English and Danish this cannot be separated from the tendency to restrict the use of the nominative to its use in immediate connexion with a (finite) verb to which it serves as subject (I do I do I), and to use the oblique form everywhere else, thus e.g. after than and as (he is older than me I not so old as me) and when the pronoun stands by itself (Who is that '-Me /). This tendency has prevailed in French, where we have moi when the word is isolated, and the nom. je, acc. me in connexion with a. verbal form, and similarly with the other personal pronouns; cf. also the isolated lui, lei, loro in Italian.' (Cf. on this development in English Progr. in Language, Ch. VII, reprinted ChE Ch. II.)
cases (nom., acc., etc.) and concrete, chiefly local cases (locative, ablative, sociative, instrumental, etc.). Wundt in much the same sense distinguishes between cases of inner determination and cases of outer determination, and Deutschbein between" kasus des begriffiichen denkens" and "kasus der anschauung." It is, however, impossible to keep these two things apart, at anyrate in the best-known languages. Not even in Finnish, with its full system of local cases, can the distinction be maintained, for the allative is used for the indirect object, and the essive, which is now chiefly a grammatical case, was originally local, as shown especially in some adverbial survivals. In Aryan languages the two categories were inextricably mingled from the first. Gradually, however, the purely concrete uses of the old cases came to be dropped, chiefly because prepositions came into use, which indicated the local and other relations with greater precision than the less numerous cases had been able to do, and thus rendered these superfluous. As time went on, the number of the old cases constantly dwindled, especially as a more regular word-order often sufficed to indicate the value of a word in the sentence. But no language of our family has at any time had a case-system based on a precise or consistent system of meanings;, in other words, case is a purely grammatical (syntactic) category and not a notional one in the true sense of the word. The chief things that cases stand for, are:
address (vocative), subject (nominative), predicative (no special case provided), object (accusative and dative), connexion (genitive), place and time, many different relations (locative, etc.), measure (no special case), manner (no special case), instrument (instrumental).
