De Ordine Casuum-- On the Ordering of the Cases

[Iynx]

The oldest explicit ordering of the Latin cases of which I am aware is in the Ars Minor of Donatus (fourth century AD):

Casus nominum quot sunt? Sex. Qui? Nominativus genetivus dativus
accusativus vocativus ablativus.

There are a couple of peculiarities here. The first is the omission of the locative. This fault of Donatus has echoed down the centuries, with multiple respected authors pontificating on the six cases in Latin while actually describing seven. Allen-&-Goodenough, Gildersleeve, Henle, the Humez brothers,Jones-&-Sidwelland Wheelock (but not Collins) are all in this regard guilty. Donatus has a lot to answer for.

Another peculiarity of Donatus' ordering is the position of the vocative. I think this is understandable if one sees Donatus (and indeed the early Latin grammarians in general) as obsessed with Greek. The ablative was relegated to the end just because Greek had no ablative; probably Donatus was echoing some earlier Greek model, with the ablative tacked on as an afterthought.

Neglecting the minor cases, Donatus' N-G-D-Ac-Ab order seems to have been dominant from his time to ours. It is used by Allen-&-Greenough, Collins, Gildersleeve, Henle, the Humez brothers, Traupman, and Wheelock.

Yet this order is not universal. In some works (such as Simpson and Jones-&-Sidwell), the ordering is N-Ac-G-D-Ab. Both these works are British as opposed to American, and chjones recently speculated in this forum that this non-Donatian scheme might be a specifically British phenomenon. There are certain real advantages to it. It perhaps facilitates memorization by putting together the strong major cases (nominative and accusative), for neuters always the same, and also by putting together the dative and ablative (so often the same). The downside is that the scheme departs from some eighteen centuries or more of tradition.

But it has at least a century of its own: I know that at least one British primer from the late nineteenth century that used it rather than the Donatian order.

One consequence of this is, of course, that while we may speak of the First Declension or the Second Conjugation, we cannot treat the cases as lying in an analogous fixed numeric order.

I would be very interested to learn what order-of-cases is used in other primers, grammars, etc. Does anybody have access to a Latin primer in a language other than Latin or English? Of the English works I have cited, there does seem to be a sharp divide, with the American works adopting the Donatian order, and the British the other. What about on-line resources? Please include, if you can, a reference to the nationality of the author.

 

[Cato]

This page is by a French Latinist who has photocopied pages from an old grammar (1939?) written by Gaston Cayrou, Andre Prevot, and Mme. Prevot.

Here is the page describing declension cases in the "British" order.

 

[Cato]

Hmm..problem with the second link in my last post. Use the first link and click on the drop-down to p6-7.

 

[Donaldus]

Funny, I was going to bring up the Jacques Brel song Rosa, Rosa, Rosam.

 

[Marius Magnus]

Conceptually, I tend to think of the cases as

Nominative
Accusative
Dative
Genitive
Ablative
Vocative

The locative case really is pretty much atrophied, but it would appear next to the ablative, because my conceptual list groups the cases by function. The first three represent basic grammatical elements (subject, direct object, indirect object), while the later ones represent relationships and modifiers which are not strictly necessary for forming a complete sentence. Nominative, accusative, and dative are, in this sense, the most "basic".

Also, my German textbooks have always used the NADG order, for the same reason, I would guess. Also, Latin is similar to German in that the nominative and accusative are always identical for neuter words.

 

[Solange]

I quote from my post in another topic regarding the order of cases:

'Coincidentally, I have just borrowed the Oxford Latin Grammar from my local library and there is a section about this. Apparently, it dates back to August 1866 and the publication of The Public School Latin Primer by one Benjamin Hall Kennedy, then headmaster of Shrewsbury School in England. His book created quite a storm in its day, and not only because of his use of this 'new' order of the declensions. If anyone is interested, I will post more details.'

In answer to one positive response, it appears that Mr Kennedy had previously written an Elementary Latin Grammar, which presumably had been well received.

However, the Primer was criticised in several letters to The Times which asserted that, inter alia, the primer was too difficult for young children and the author had introduced a new order of the cases, although in this regard he was following in the footsteps of other British grammarians. It seems that it was Kennedy's work that made this 'new' order (nominative, vocative, accusative, genitive, dative, ablative) the standard in the UK and therefore different from the practice on the other side of the Atlantic.

One aspect of his work that did apparently meet with approval was his inclusion of some 'gender rhymes' to assist students. Having read a few of these, my own feeling is that they would be rather more difficult to remember than some of the mnemonics cited in another topic! I suspect that there is no substitute for blood, sweat and tears...