This is fascinating. In Polish, the way I was taught in school, the order is similar to the traditional Latin one: Nominative, Genitive, Dative, Accusative. Then instead of Ablative we have Instrumental and Locative. And at the end, of course, Vocative.
Indeed! The people who speak highly inflected languages and actually use cases in their lives, the Greeks, the Slavs, have no problem using a traditional order based on the ancient pattern. The syncretistic order seems to attempt to solve a problem that never existed.
I never heard of Rask before, but I'm 95% sure that he's a Swede. It's a typical Swedish name, usually given to soldiers in the 19th Century. Rask is Swedish for 'quick' or 'fast'. I have a similar name myself after a relative who was a soldier back then. Francis Dec is just my nickname on YT.
@@polyMATHY_Luke The only thing these alternative orders achieved is confusion when i started learning case names in English (Polish has translated original Latin terms) because they were listed in different order.
The same in Romanian: nominative, genitive, dative, accusative, vocative. That was in the 70s-80s, when I was in school. But even now, I remember the questions you have to ask to distinguish between cases. Especially as genitive and dative are similar in Romanian.
While watching this video, the following poem came to mind: The centipede was happy quite Until the toad, in fun Said “Pray, which leg comes after which?” This raised her doubts to such a pitch She fell exhausted in a ditch Not knowing how to run.
I was taught nom., voc., acc., gen., dat., abl. back in the seventies, and our textbooks were printed that way. They were pretty old so it must have been current in the middle of the last century. We used to chant the declensions so they’re stuck in my head that way (even though I’m mentally correcting them all anyway now by adding the long vowels)
I'm not even sure that the vocative was mentioned much. I remember the order as being nom., acc., gen., dat., abl., plus also voc., which is the same as nom. except in the 2nd declension masc. sing.. Why remember 6 cases when 5 + 1 exception works?
@@polyMATHY_Luke Exactly, so it's not exactly "new". And what is this business of marking long vowels, which was not done in any of the Latin that I remember?
I learnt the traditional order from _Alice in Wonderland,_ where Alice remembers ‘A mouse - of a mouse - to a mouse - a mouse - O mouse!’ from her sister's textbook. I don't know why the ablative (presumably ‘by a mouse’) is missing here, but it confused me when I found out that it existed.
Most probably the ablative wasn't included because the (Latin) ablative can serve about a ton of different purposes, some of them with prepositions some without.
I appreciate this, since Alice in Wonderland was written in 1865, which is yesterday in historical terms, yet Englishmen in the comments have frequently defended their current Latin case order as "traditional" because it's been around for 150 years. This quote shows it wasn't very long ago that the change occurred.
@@polyMATHY_Lukeas someone currently studying Latin in school in the England, the order we have learnt is nominative accusative genitive dative ablative. It’s in the Cambridge Latin Course
As well; the thing that makes learning it the ‘proper’ way more useful is that words in Latin dictionaries are listed nominative-genitive first. That way you don’t confuse e.g. masculine second declension nouns (most of which end in -us in the nominative singular) and for example third declension neuter nouns (some of which end in -us in the nominative singular) or fourth declension masculine and feminine (which also often end in -us in the nominative singular).
I go to a secondary school in northern Argentina, and we always were taught with the Nom, Voc, Acc, Gen, Dat, Abl order. Didn't even know that there was another order.
I learned Latin declensions the traditional way, N, G, D, Akk., Abl., V (and still teach them that way). When we started with Greek, we used a grammar with NADGV, and initially, the teacher tried to make us memorize the declensions according to the book. However, we students automatically reverted to the order we were used to (minus the ablative, obviously) and found it easier to jump between lines than learn the new pattern. You make some valid points in your video (and I'm glad to hear I'm doing it "right" ;)), but I feel at the end of the day it's mostly about habit.
Well said, thanks for sharing. I’m the same way; it’s easier for me to apply whatever new book’s paradigms or new language’s declensions to the traditional order that is so familiar to me. Indeed, a matter of a habit.
Also in German you use the traditional order, because the genitive shows the declension paradigm. E.g. nom: Friede (preace) gen: Friedens (of peace) - here one sees that the other cases are declined with -en > dem Frieden, den Frieden. Or it helps to distinguish which noun is meant, e.g. der Bauer (the builder) vs der Bauer (the pawn/peasant) des Bauers (of the builder) vs. des Bauern (of the pawn/peasant).
When I started learning; I listed it Nominative-Accusative-Genitive then the rest (because those were the three I thought would be most used). Then I switched to doing it the ‘correct’ way.
@@polyMATHY_Luke well I thought doing it the nominative-accusative-genitive way would be a shortcut-a cheat if you will to learning the declensions (because I thought, perhaps rashly; ‘pffft, when am I going to need to use dative and ablative?!?’) Then when I started getting deeper into the declensions (like, when I got to the third and fourth), and found all the nouns *also* ending in -us; and noticed they were always listed nominative-genitive in nearly all Latin dictionaries, I realised actually…doing it the ‘correct’ way is actually easier.
Ørberg has Nominative-Accusative-Genitive-Dative-Ablative and usually skips Vocative, but when I learned German in elementary and high school it was Nominative-Genitive-Accusative-Dative. It comes to mind: modern Swedish mostly lacks grammatical genders, just like modern English, except in dialects, but the Old Swedish singular masculine accusative is now the "nominative". For example: 'någon'=someone, which is the grammatical gender "utrum" or "reale". In Old Swedish this was the singular masculine accusative, 'nokun', while the nominative was 'nokur'.
@@francisdec1615 when I learned German at my secondary school (I don’t know what the equivalent is in the US, but it’s 11-16, so high school-I guess?) they did it nominative-genitive, same when I did Latin at the same school. I didn’t really understand it back then though because they didn’t really explain cases properly. Same with the tenses-they’d throw words like ‘perfect’ and ‘pluperfect’ around, without explaining what they actually meant.
Way back in the 1980s I developed my own case order based on my obsession with Proto Indo-European studies: NVAGADIL. I figured Nom, Voc, Acc formed a natural grouping, with genitive starting a new series: Gen, Abl, Instrumental, Locative. The last two case names are based on PIE studies. I even pronounce VAGADIL like vah-gah-deel as a memory device. I've always had a healthy respect for Sanskrit and the modern Slavic languages so my system works for me. I'm too old to change. 😁
Huh that's really cool. I'm actually curious about PIE, did it have largely the same rules as Latin? Also how do you pronounce h1, h2 and h3 (pretend the numbers are small)?
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Czech here. In Czech classes, the Czech cases are taught by their number, the names are (almost) not even mentioned (which is a mistake, I think, but that's not the point here). The order is 1. nominative 2. genetive 3. dative 4. accusative 5. vocative 6. locative 7. instrumental When learning Latin, I actually have hard time thinking in terms of nominative, genetive... and not in terms of 1st case, 2nd case... So, for me the "old" order is totally natural, especially since the locative is in Latin "dissolved" into the dative (3rd - half of 6, which is remembered easily) and ablative (which is at "the end", just like locative), and instrumental maps pretty much 1:1 to the ablative, i.e. also being at "the end". Vocative is still sticking out there not at the end, but since our Slovak brothers and sisters just next to us don't have it (with Slovak and Czech being like 95% mutually intelligible), and since English is ubiquitous and also does not have it, it is not a problem. Old order FTW 😀
While granting that there is a great deal of subjectivity involved, as Luke acknowledges at the end of the video (we tend to prefer whichever method we ourselves learned), my own experience with students is that they definitely find the "new" order (NVAcGDAb) easier to memorise. To quote Allen and Brink, in the study Luke quotes at 7:25, "The 'new' order has solid advantages, both theoretical and practical, over the 'old'." That is my opinion too, I must say. A teacher may face a dilemma, however, when the best textbook available (by every other criterion) uses the 'old' order. One solution is to use that book, but prepare "tables" of the declensions in the 'old' order and distribute them to the students. Or maybe author one's own text!
that's exactly what I ended up doing ... creating my own text. And like you, having made the switch to the new order, I do think it's easier on students.
Thanks for the comment! ""The 'new' order has solid advantages, both theoretical and practical, over the 'old'." That is my opinion too, I must say." Allen & Brink take this position, but they don't support it, leaving it as self-evident. Could you tell us why it's easier to memorize? Teachers who use the traditional order, here in the comments and around the world, swear by the advantages of the classical sequence of the cases, and you and others of the UK and Commonwealth countries make the same argument that your system is the better one. Is this testable? Or could we all be wrong, and it's just subjectivity? If you find a book you like but it has a different case order, as you said, then there is no reason to force yourself or the students to adapt to it; keep doing what you're doing, converting all the tables in the book to your preferred order as necessary.
it would be testable if everyone who teaches Latin tried switching to see if it made a difference. This is by no means scientific, but personally I've spoken to maybe 6-8 people who have switched from the traditional to the new order when teaching. A couple said it made no difference, the others all said that they felt that it was easier for students to learn with the New Order. I've never heard of anyone who switched the other way.
In Finnish, the cases are grouped by what their purpose is, usually in groups of 3: For example, internal locative cases: Inessive (inside of something) - talossa (inside a house) Elative (coming from inside of something) - talosta (coming from inside of house) Illative (going inside something) - taloon (going inside a house) Finnish also has native names for cases, but foreigners are usually taught the Latin names
And that's still the standard for the UK: virtually all materials published in the UK use that order and publishers produce US editions with the classical order for sale over the Pond. So Morwood's _Oxford Latin Grammar,_ for example, has a UK and a US edition (I have a copy of each). If you're buying second hand on the internet from overseas, make sure you know which edition you are buying. The same with _Athenaze!_
That would explain why the Athenaze copies I have use the traditional order. Lol you Englishmen, why did you have to go messing up a good thing?! haha. j/k
This is so enlightening. I thought that there were two systems; British and American. My approach has always been: If you are using a British book, write the paradigms with the American system and vice versa. This is because I have to have ALL forms at instant recall, which should not depend on a “table” of words.
Great video. Consider doing a video like this on verbs. As a portuguese native speaker I found strange that latin dictionaries prefer the first person singular as the default form of the verb, where in romance the infinitive seems to be viewed as the default form.
I think that part of Latin might also be modelled after Greek. In Ancient Greek, verbs can be either 'thematic' aka o-verbs (meaning they add a stem vowel between the root and the ending) or 'athematic' aka mi-verbs (no stem vowel). These two categories have different present tense endings. Obviously this doesn't work in Latin, where all verbs are 'thematic' (except sum/esse and its derivations, as well as fero/ferre and its derivations)
Thanks! This is because Latin verbs show much more information in the first person singular. And in any case the first two parts go together: legō legere, moneō monēre, capiō capere, sentiō sentīre, this is what we need to figure the conjugation of the verb in present, future, and imperfect.
As an Indo-Europeanist first, and a classicist second, I tend to moreorless follow the Sanskrit order (albeit with the vocative moved to the start) because when discussing the evolution of case systems being able to see syncretisms clearly is especially useful It generally maximises the syncretic forms placed adjacent to each other, but there are still ambiguities that leaves in the order (e.g. the nom-voc-acc can be permuted however you like without disrupting syncretisms, the oblique cases can be reversed, and there's also a limited amount of ambiguity within the order of the oblique cases as well) Aesthetically I also like the idea of grouping cases by function, similarly to how it's often done in Uralic languages where the cases denoting syntactic relationships typically come first, then locative cases, and then various others. If we subdivided the syntactic relationships into those with verbs and nouns we might then get something like nom acc dat gen loc abl inst voc
regarding the nominative/genitive syncretism seen in many third declension nouns, this again seems less important from a diachronic point of view. The endings are the same (for athematic nouns at least), but they do not generally have the same stem (although by the era of Latin, the root is at least almost always in the same grade), so it makes sense from a (diachronic) syncreticist PoV not to place the genitive between the nominative and accusative It is however a good argument to go accusative, nominative, genitive though, although that would likely annoy enven more people!
An important argument at least in PIE, and perhaps for Sanskrit and others too, is that athematic stems show ablaut. Nom-voc-acc ("weak" cases) have one stem ablaut pattern, and the other ("strong") cases have another pattern. Therefore, if you want to show the full range of forms with just a few principal parts, you always have to show one weak case form and one strong case form. But on the other hand, in a declension table it makes sense to group forms using the same stem form together, i.e. showing the syncretism *in the stem itself*.
German was my first foreign language that had cases on words other than pronouns. I relied heavily on a handout that I bought at a bookstore that had a few dozen charts on it. From that, I learned the paradigm for the definite article in the order nominative, accusative, dative, genitive. I didn't ever question that, because it was all I knew, and because that's the same order that I think makes sense to teach cases. ("The boy" sees, The boy sees "the dog", The boy throws "the dog" a bone, The boy loves "his" dog. That seems like the natural progression of learning grammar.) Years later I took three semesters of Koine Greek. Our textbook had (what I later learned was) the traditional order of nominative, genitive, dative, accusative. At first I tried memorizing in that order, but it just confused me because NADG was just so entrenched in my brain, so I ended up having to copy every single new declension that we learned into my notes in the order I was used to. (The "copy into my notes" part probably aided memorization, but the "make sure to copy it differently than the book has it" was annoying.) It was inconvenient, and when my classmates would ask me for help, or when I had to recite a noun in all its declensions in class, I would have to switch orders in my head. All that to say this: The most important thing is consistency (which I think is pointed out well in this video), and the traditional order has been used for literally millenia. I always recommend to people that they learn cases in the traditional order, because then the majority of language-learning material will match what they're used to. I've accepted that any new language I learn with 4 or 5 PIE cases I'm just gonna have to reorder all the charts for myself into NADG. That's annoying and a waste of time. It would've been much better to have started out in the significantly-more-widespread order. Anyway, thanks so much for long and informative videos like this. It always improves my day to see you (or Jackson or Simon) upload a 40+ minute video.
In Germany you learn the traditional one, unless you are a DAF, which like to teach falsehoods about the language because they think it would make it easier to learn. The order is Nominative, Genitive, Dative, Accusative. The Genitive as second, because you simply then knows how to decline the other cases.
@@SchmulKriegerWhat is the falsehood here exactly? I don't see how the order of cases is true or false, it's just convention. You can argue which is better but it's no less true if you list a declension in the order NADG or NGDA
@@merchantmaker1771 they teach falsehoods like those declension of a noun aren't oblique cases because they are adverbs and such dumb stuff. Genitivus absolutus is often taught as an adverbal. It's not. Also prepositional object get taught often as adverbials which they aren't. But that's for the DAF.
great, now I'm going to be chanting "a ae ae am a ae arum is as is us i o um o i orum is os is..." for the rest of the day. same phenomenon as getting an old familiar song stuck in your head, I suppose. edit: just got to the part where you mention it's like a song. right on.
I was taught Greek with the old system, with Vocative at the end. This goes for both modern and ancient. I'm not old enough to encounter Dative in modern though.We only use it in certain phrases now.
I teach in Australia where NVAGDA historically prevails and literally no one says ‘lupus lupum’. This problem is completely imaginary. As an example, everyone chants the verbs in o s t mus tis nt order but no one says ‘dico dicis’ when trying to supply a dictionary form. You learn dictionary forms (principal parts) and you learn paradigms. The first 2 words of each do not have to match. I learned Latin with NVAGDA and learned Greek with NGDAV, and did not notice a mite of difference. The goal in either case is to convert the linear table chant into automatic single item recall through lots of applied practice. My advice is simply, pick a system and stick with it, preferably one which you can easily get materials in. The choice is truly arbitrary and matters less and less in the long term.
Also: Yes I can attest, after teaching hundred of students I have literally never had a problem arise from student learning paradigms in the NVAGDA order. There is literally zero downside to using either traditional or nouveau order.
Agreed! You have a beautiful song on your channel; here it is for anyone who comes upon this thread: th-cam.com/video/HZ_U1k8oH6U/w-d-xo.htmlsi=K1p8gvpzyqWDt-Rc
I learned nom-gen-acc-abl (Latin) and same in Greek (minus abl of course). Of course then I ran into a Greek grammar book that was nom-acc-gen (but as "subject" "object" and "pos" case!) Dative didn't show until Ecce Romanae II andmodern Greek rarely uses it outside of canned expressions. In modern Romanian nom-acc and gen-dat have merged and in modern Greek 3rd declension masc and fem nouns (but not neuter) have become 1st declension in demotic by way of accusitive forms such as Ellas to Ellada, metēr to metera, patēr to pateras by way of patera.
The order of the cases has been irrelevant to me so far because I'm not memorising a table. I'm just learning them through reading. I don't need to go through a table in my mind to find the correct case. I just learned them. It's a lot easier that way. I tried the memorisation approach but 10 minutes after repeating it I'd forget everything. But with the natural learning technique I don't even have to think about them that hard. It just makes sense in my head. Thank the gods I came across your video about LLPSI. It was life changing. I hadn't heard of the natural approach technique before that. Even when I was studying English I remember having to memorise a list of irregular verbs, their past and participle. It was kind of crazy looking back at it now. I'm going to use the natural approach for other languages now that I know how it works.
Indeed. This should be the goal of learning the language, right? Instead of seeing the tables in front of you, when you think about a case, you just know the case-endings in Sg. & Pl.. It then becomes irrelevant what order they are in. Familia Romana uses a different order, than the one I learned in school, but it doesn't matter, because you aren't memorizing the order, you are memorizing the individual cases through repetition in context (and the exercitia, of course).
That's awesome, I'm glad LLPSI has been of such value. However, memorization of the declensions was something done not only by literate native speakers of Latin and Ancient Greek, but is done today by native speakers of Polish, Russian, Croatian, Ukrainian, and many others. Equally, all Italian school children learn the conjugation patterns of all their verbs in school. Memorizing paradigms is very much a part of the "natural" experience. Please keep doing what you're doing if it works for you, but some methods might also be of use later on.
Rosa, rosae, rosae, rosam, rosa, rosa. Breaks down into: 1) Greek cases before extra (in the case) Latin case(s) 2) Grammatical (or in sentence) Greek cases before Vocative (which is an exclamatory sentence on its own). 3) Subject-predicate or rectus case before oblique cases. 4) Oblique cases ordered according to Greek spatial connotations (from, in, to).
Belgium also uses the UK order. In our case it was tied to how it was taught in textbooks (start with simple subject-verb sentences, introduce sentences with a direct object, introduce posession, ...) but that's probably sort of incidental.
I went to a half-German school in France, and in German, the most common order is nom., gen., dat., akk., while in Latin, we learnt nom., voc., acc., gen., dat., abl. as the order, and now I'm learning Icelandic, the common order of which is nom., acc., dat., gen. (or nf., þf., þgf., ef. in Icelandic)
In the 1960s we learned the Nom/Gen order. I find it more useful now to memorize also the Ablative when learning a new word because it also immediately tells me which declension the word belongs to. As soon as one memorizes the order of the vowels: A, O, I/e, U, E (capital meaning a long vowel), one can put the new word into its proper declension, which for me is more meaningful than trying to remember 1st, 2nd, etc. So, I learn Nom/Gen/Abl when learning vocabulary.
Very timely video for me as I’ve reached chapter 6 of LLPSI and determined it’s time to memorize the 1st and 2nd declensions. I’m going with the traditional order. Thank you
Personally I think it would make the most sense to list the Genitive form first, as that is the case that determines which declension a noun/adjective is in and always reveals what the stem is that can be used to make all the oblique cases. I'd also prefer to list the infinite of verbs first and then the first person singular.
I think it's kinda neat to have syncretic forms next to each other. Also, from a linguistic perspective, the new orders tend to go from more basic cases with a grammatical function to those with more semantic content. Also, the Latin/Greek order has been carried over to other European languages, where I think it makes less sense. For instance in German, the nominative and accusative are always homophone, except for the masculine singular. From a linguistic perspective, it makes sense to say that German only distinguishes the accusative in the masculine singular. Yet, most people don't realize this, at it is obscured by the traditional order of cases, which gives the impression that the accusative is always a separate case and merely happens to sound the same as the nominative sometimes (in fact, most of the time). The situation is similar in Russian, though there it's the feminine singular that uniquely marks the accusative. But yeah, for Latin and Greek there never really was a need to change the order
Thanks for the comment. Interestingly, Slavic speakers all strongly favor their traditional order. Naturally we all favor the thing we're used to, but it seems that our rationalization from outside the realm of native speakers (like the 19th century scholars with respect to Latin) is not very useful. The native speakers seem to like NOM-GEN. That's worth considering.
Thanks for this video. I discussed this once with a friend and I couldn't argue as well as you do. Greeks and Romans were used to memorising a lot more than us, so it's useful to assume that the traditional order is easier to memorise.
Thanks for the comment. I am definitely of the opinion that the traditional order has more advantages. It's interesting how many millions of native Slavic speakers use the traditional order in their own languages.
I'd like to stress that it really comes down to the question how the paradigm is used - as a matter of fact I sometimes use different orders both as a teacher and a scholar! When teaching I usually don't refer to declensions but to specific words, so I'd use the traditional order for most of the reasons you mentioned and because it is the prevalent one in my country. But when talking specifically about the declensions I often want to point to certain patterns within them, and I do that by putting identical forms next to each other so that my students can see at first glance where e.g. Nominative and Accusative are the same and where not. (This also means that I never omit any case but rather write identical forms of the example words over two spaces in the table.) And finally, I usually use the traditional order for myself, but as soon as I take up any diachronic or comparative work I inevitably end up with the 'new' one, since the Indo-European 'strong' cases Nom Akk Vok (Sg.) indeed are grouped together morphologically and were mostly continued as these exact cases, while the other ones underwent complex merging and regrouping processes - so I need Gen Dat Abl Loc Inst next to each other and not separated by the Accusative in order to trace their evolution. Overall, both systems have every right to exist, as always it is our task as teachers to use them to our students' advantage.
Personally I prefer the variety of NGDAA rather than lumping together forms that tend to be syncretic; as you say in the video lumping together similar forms leads to imbalances across declensions and I would find that harder to memorize compared the generally synchystic nature of the traditional order, which maintains variety
Yes! So nice to hear you advocate for the traditional order. Strongly accustomed to N.G.D.A... in my mother tongue and other languages, and the LLPSI's order is so annoying :) And so is, for example, the order in Icelandic textbooks I've used, but I assume it's more of a general Germanic linguistics thing. I think, for a person who deals with mutiple inflectional languages, there needs to be a common ground for learning paradigms, for which role the traditional way of arranging cases is probably an obvious solution. It helps if you tend to visualize a matrix in your head when recalling declensions
I am used to the traditional paradigm. It's the same paradigm I learned with Russian and Irish. With Irish it makes even more sense to have genitive come directly after the nominative: the five Irish declensions are determined not by things like gender or word forms, but by how the genitive is formed. Now that I wish to learn Latin, and after watching this video, I just want to keep with what is familiar. I have stayed with it even with Sumerian which has cases that are not found in most Indo-European languages.
In Lithuanian the declination of nouns, adjectives and pronouns is In the classical order: nominative, genitive, dative, accusative, instrumental, locative, vocative. There are also a couple of non- obligatory locatives, such as place where to (illative) still used in several.dialects and in a higher style of the literary language. I learnt Latin and Greek with the classical order of cases: why change a good thing that works? I deplore the modernday tendency of change for changes sake.
The illative and addessive cases in Lithuanian are as old as the written literary language (1500's) but yes, they are considered an "innovation" compared to the other, inherited indogermanic cases.
I have always used Indic numerals, when I need to denote case in Indo-European and Dravidian contexts, and I use Sanskrit order, because it covers most use cases in most of those languages. The order is 1: Nominative, 2: Accusative, 3: Instrumental, 4: Dative, 5: Ablative, 6: Genitive, 7: Locative. It is very obviously ordered by syncretic values. A lot of endings are shared between cases in Sanskrit, especially in the dual and plural forms of most paradigms. (And, as noted, it is also identical to Rask's order.) Vocative is somewhat lumped with Nominative, because the case endings only differ in the singular, but it's usually listed at the end of charts. I don't really have a standard denotation for it. Sometimes I use 0, sometimes [VOC]. I save my extra numerals for my non-Indo-European cases that still have decent overlap. For instance, my 8 is Mongolian's comitative or Malayalam's sociative case. It's interesting that people care so much. I think it's a holdover from older language-learning methods, like having students recite declension tables out loud. I pretty much only use it as a notation device, when noting an unusual or markèdly non-English construction (in Sanskrit, you always fear *from* something, in the Ablative, but you love *on* something in the Locative). Or when a script or sandhi have so jammed words together that the word endings are no longer obvious, at a glance. I have long sinced moved away from table-chanting in favor of chunking and memorizing sentences that use all different words, but from the same paradigm. I don't have this problem at all in languages that still have obvious and independent particles acting as function words, like Japanese fuzokugo. Parts of speech are built right into the language, so specifying with a number would feel silly. I wonder if there is a traditional order to the joshi particles, though.... 🤔
In Croatia we have N G D A V AB for learning latin. When we learn Croatian, it's N G D A V L I, so same as Latin, only AB replaced with L I. Greek is the same only without AB. But when learning German we get N A and I'm not sure if it's then D G or G D Also, we never skipped vocative. But I do remember that it was mentioned that there are different orders and I guess there might be some textbooks with different orders, but they are for sure much more rare
35 minutes in and this is my favorite video yet! Aside from the Halloween video where I learned about werewolf and how so many languages share words. A huge relization which opened my eyes. Gratias Luke.
In my personal notes I always thought of nominative, vocative, and accusative as forming a natural general category, genitive as its own thing, and everything else as a third category. But if the order of writing out the declension is making a difference, you might learning the wrong thing. In English, it is very natural to think of the nominative as the root form of a noun and all variations (e.g. plural) as derivations, but that doesn't make as much sense in Latin where the nominative is frequently the form which undergoes the most transformation compared to the others.
I’m poring over Priscian’s *Institutiones Grammaticae* right now so I’m going to follow his order for learning the declensions - nominative, genitive, dative, accusative, vocative, ablative (this is the order given in book V, which is akin to the order set forth by Donatus - “casus nominum quot sunt? sex. qui? nominatiuus genetiuus datiuus accusatiuus uocatiuus ablatiuus.”).
As someone who has studied a little bit of latin and has created conlangs before. I think the order should be the nomitive form, the form the stem of the noun can be derived and the rest can come in any paradigm. When i created a conlang, i chose to use the order Nom, Acc, Dat, and Gen with 2 extras that came at the end because not all nound had them and thus they could be dropped from the paradigm. The reasoning for my order was really simple. The accusitive form could be used to find the stem of all masculine and feminine nouns. The exception was that all neuter nouns have the same singular nom and acc form. Thus you used the dat form. This works and worked for my conlang becusse i made it. I think something like this could be applied to natural languages and certain paradigms could still be used like syncretized pairings. I dont know. I think the best way is what works best for people. If a language has a paradigm where the base form of a noun was derived from the dative form, then that would work best because as with verbs, the stem is most important because it is what the endings are added to.
@@SchmulKrieger Not at all; English is quite flexible in this regard. The idea that prepositions must not be at the end is a prescriptivist idea derived from Latin popularized in the past two centuries. But while it's acceptable, it's certainly less "English".
@polyMATHY_Luke Exactly. English verbs, in many cases, are "two part" verbs. a verb joined with a preposition. The prep can appear almost anywhere in a sentence. This gives English a great deal of flexibility. E.g. Take on me, take me on. (But, interestingly, not ontake me, which Latin often does). Basically, English is not Latin. It has its own grammar.
In Spain, the standard order taught at schools is N, Voc, Acc, G, D, Abl. This has been the case for many decades, but I don't know when this tradition started.
Thank you for this video! I have kind of been torn between which order I personally prefer, and you have definitely convinced me of the traditional one's greater utility. As you said in the conclusion, this is a rather minor concern, however - and in addition to what you said, I would like to add that I personally think it more pedagogically apt to stress commonalities between case endings across declensions (the m in the masculine and feminine of the accusative singular, the long stem vowel or -e for consonant stems in the ablative singular, etc.), which I have found much more helpful with the Latin students I've tutored because it helps reduce the load of memorizing all the declensions. The dative singular, for instance, always ends in ī, regardless of declension (with the footnote of phonetic developments in o and ā stems). I am not experienced enough to have a solid opinion on this, but based on what I've seen, I definitely prefer focusing on individual case endings over entire declension paradigms, and if declension tables are treated as being more something to look up in case of doubt than something that is actively incorporated into the classroom through, say, declension chants, that, of course, makes the order much less important. In that case in particular, though, sticking to the traditional order is definitely best, if only because it allows for easier acclimation into the world of dictionaries.
Thanks for watching the whole video, it's a long one, and I'm glad if it helped you in your quandry. Like I mentioned in the video, I had anticipated that the benefits of the syncretistic order would have been made plain by its advocates, but as far as I've read so far, the argument is entirely hypothetical on the part of the syncretists: syncretic forms next to each other are easier to memorize, and the traditional order is harder. But there is zero evidence of that. Allen & Brink convinced me that the syncretistic order is, if anything, slightly less useful than the traditional one. I was frankly surprised that two such brilliant men based their conclusion on 'having the genitive next to the nominative will make the student and future scholar believe they are more similar to each other than the nom to the acc.' That's what really pushed me in the other direction. I agree with you: stressing the commonality of endings across declensions.
This is one of my biggest struggles and mind mistery. Here in Italy at school we learn declinationes in this exact order, as you said: Nominative - Genitive - Dative - Accusative - Ablative - Vocative. And I always had HUGE difficulties to memorize them. BUT if I use the following order, I remember them muuuch better: - Nominative - Accusative - Genitive - Dative - Ablative - Vocative I have no idea why it is so, but this is the sequence I remember better. And it's the sequence that comes in my mind first... and it's kinda a struggle because I always have to make one mental step more when I do my exercises...
I don't have a lot of experience with Latin, but I've worked with case systems before while conlanging (one of my conlangs has 26 noun cases- I have never felt as much like a mad scientist as I did fleshing out those grammar tables (I needed 2 bc I maxed out the size of the tables in the software I was using lol)). Because of this, I tend to order cases in a way that makes it easier for me to remember what each case actually is, regardless of its inflection patterns. That way I can use similar orders regardless of language, or when starting to make tables for languages where I'm still building the inflection patterns. For Latin, I would tend to favor something like Nominative, Accusative, Dative, Ablative, Genitive, Vocative, because 1) it puts the two most basic (in usage anyway) at the start, 2) all of the "object" cases are next to each other, with the two "indirect object" cases also next to one another, 3) Dative followed by Ablative makes it easier for me to remember which is which as an English speaker, given expressions like "to and from" tend to be in that order, 4) Genetive and Vocative are both neither subject nor object, so they sorta get tacked on at the end. This way it also (sorta) follows case heirarchy (nominative < accusative/ergative < genitive < etc.), just with the dative and ablative moved up to be next to the accusative bc it's more intuitive for me that way.
A lot of people here seem to prefer the traditional way but it’s a matter of what you’re used to. I learnt the new order of cases and the traditional order just looks abhorrent to me 😅
I watched this all the way through. You give an excellent reason for beginners: what we see in the dictionary. I was interested in your comment about memorization. I have dyslexia and ADHD. I studied German for 11 years, plus a year of French and Ecclesiastical Latin growing up and now working on my third year of studying it formally. My whole adult life, I could use a dictionary to compose in German, I could read reasonably well and understand spoken German at about 85% content. However I’ve never learned to speak a language other than English because I cannot memorize. I have a masters in math and was SO good at my career at NASA because I was always proving the math, being unable to memorize formulas. I became astoundingly good at problem solving (and re-learning things I promptly forgot). Last year I began a story-based German program (a hilarious evil genius inventing a machine to forced everyone to wear lime green lederhosen and obey) where we had to defeat the foe. It involved travel words, everyday vocabulary and over the course, slowly increased the German and decreased English use. I did it for fun because I was going to be in Austria and Germany this summer with a daughter who spoke no German. To my immense surprise, after ten days (and a lifetime of study), I was able to translate street signs and ads without effort, and unknowingly sent a few texts home in German. Without thinking about it. My speech was still poor but obviously a connection was made in the brain that was long missed. I think your story-based Latin course will be a natural way to learn. I’m 69. I learned German with RECORDS in school, and with grammar books. Your kind of approach was very new. Our current Latin class (taught by my husband for our parish) uses Lingua Latinae Per Se Illustrata, the ecclesiastical version. It works well. But I would learn faster with more humor and inventiveness in the story line. I’m struggling to keep up because it requires more memorization that I am able to do. By the way this is a family trait: my mother studied French and Hebrew, my dad, French. Both loved foreign languages but neither could memorize. I’m happy that my husband can and most of our children except the 3 with dyslexia. One learned French, German and Latin, managing to speak French in Germany, German in Italy and Latin in Greece. Not all brains are wired the same. But at least we love languages! A son who CAN memorize also learned Russian and Japanese, and a daughter Latin, Greek and Hebrew in addition to French and German. At least the rest of us try.
I learned the ‘nouveau’ way (NVAGDA) and the vocative was *never* omitted. But to answer one of your point, we would still memorise nouns with the nominative and the genitive, eg lupus, lupi as the ‘identity’ of the noun, and then the whole declension, eg lupus lupe lupum lupi lupo lupo. I remember that I actually appreciated having this little help in the middle of the declension since I already knew the genitive from the noun’s ‘identity’. This is sort of similar to what you said about how it makes it easier when you have previously-learned knowledge repeated in the middle of new things to learn.
The third most important reason for maintaining the traditional order descends somewhat into the farcical. The video envisions a student using the New Order asking a professor if a word is manus, manus, manum, manūs rather than “is it manus, manūs,” since of course if one uses the New Order, one has to include all the forms that occur between the principal parts (and the genitive in the New Order has been moved below the vocative and accusative). This would be like someone arguing that someone should indicate a conjugation of a word is by listing the entire present tense first before citing the infinitive. And those are the three _most_ important reasons for keeping the traditional order!
I have to place my hand on my face like Captain Picard, because you simply are not listening to what I say in the video, nor reading my responses to you. The point of all this is indeed to be farcical - you use it as an accusation, but that's like pointing at a bird and calling it a bird. The purpose of the whole discussion was to show that the order of the cases doesn't produce any of the supposed benefits. I have repeatedly written this to you in every thread, and stated this clearly in the video itself. Your writing and expressive skills are top noch, but your listening and reading comprehension seems to leave something to be desired, given the straw man you keep attacking.
Hi Luke, I think we're just talking past each other a bit to be honest. I've acknowledged that your point is that one is not better than the other. However, I also noted that while that was the stated argument, that your tone and condescension etc. expressed in the video make me believe that it's far more than that, and that you are actually a ticked off by the fact people use (and defend) the New Order. Certainly I couldn't think of anything else that would explain why you so savagely took the piss out of Allen and Brink when you mocked their accent, for example. But whether I'm right or wrong on this point (as I've acknowledged before), the fact is, you fundamentally attacked a straw man, for you made the entire video about morphological syncretism, while this was the secondary and complementary reason given by Allen and Brink. You say you read the article word for word three times, so I am lost as to how you failed to comprehend this.
If the scales of Western music theory can have modes, why not the declension schemes of Latin education? ---- Magister: "Decimus, your word is 'quercus'. Decline it Mixolydian-style." ---- Magister: "Mīles Davis Tertius, 'bucina'. Start Dorian, modulate to Aeolian, and bring it home Phrygian."
Here's another bit of trivia about case endings: most linguists who study the Indo-European languages collectively believe that the most primitive form of nouns is the accusative. The root form was simply spoken and the lips were snapped shut. This formed an "m" sound with thematic nouns and no sound at all with athematic nouns ending in a consonant like "kaput". The nominative came later. The other cases came later still and probably originated as short descriptive phrases uttered after the root form, similar to the way compound words are formed in Native American languages. I think people spoke a lot slower back then as well. A case ending like "-ibus" probably originated in a multi-word phrase thousands of years before the evolution of Latin.
@@dragons123ismactually not. Because that's the perspective we have today because in many languages where case system is lost or reduced in inflection, the accusative becomes the nominative, such as in Modern Greek, where Hellas is the original nominative and Hellada is the accusative, nowadays the nominative is also Hellada. Default that s > d, like Greek poetas - poetad, and then tell me that the accustive is simply the root word, which totally wrong.
@@SchmulKrieger The nominative form was eclipsed by the accusative form because the accusative was thought of as the 'basic' form of the noun, cf. its use in exclamations etc.
What makes the most semse to me N G and then everything else. Nom first because you need this form since the base is often so different from the nom (iter, itineris). Then the Gen because you use that to make all the other forms. I don't really care what order the D, Acc, Ab fall in. The vocative and locative can be ignored for the most part because they're rare and have very specific conditions where they're used.
I did the UK N, V, Ac, G, D, Ab, and was a couple of years ago years old when I realised, first, that this wasn't universal and, secondly, that it was an innovation. Learning German at the moment, and textbooks seem to divide between N, A, G, D and N, A, D, G. (Allerdings ist der Genitiv ohnehin auf dem Rückzug.)
I agree that one order or the other doesn't probably help memorisation a lot. I was taught the forms one by one, and accusative was first because it was easy to form simple sentences with it. I think ablative came next 🤔 We didn't try to memorise them in a list without context. Perhaps it's because I'm Finnish and Finnish language has 16 cases in a very different system than the Indo-European system. We can't really compare the case systems for similarities. And in Finnish classes, it wouldn't make sense to rote learn a list of 16 cases both singular and plural. We focus on small parts of the list and try to make sense of individual cases.
Thank you for this explanation! I learned the traditional order of cases in the '80s, NGDAAV. Some time ago I wanted to help my daugther studying latin and I was confused with the different order they use nowaday in the school (here in Ticino, Switzerland). I think, too, that learning together N,G is very useful (something similar in German, where it's important to learn the singular and plural form together).
Very interesting! I understand that German schools maintain the traditional order. Switzerland may be receiving some influence from France where the UK order is gaining ground.
I was accustomed to Nom,acc,dat,gen from learning more germanic languages. But when I started learning latin I switched over to Nom,gen,dat,acc,abl,voc. It kinda helped me to keep it separate from the other languages I was learning so it worked out.
I’d also like to mention something that I found very helpful in studying Latin. I read both of Henry Winterfield’s Detectives in Togas books which helped with context on Ancient Rome, and later read all of Colleen McCullough’s Masters of Rome series (beware the first book is colorful) but I came to a very natural understanding of naming conventions, pronunciation of common Latin words and their use, as well as a good grasp of history, on which I later did more reading, and continue to do. I recommend both sets of books. Henry Winterfield’s books are akin to a 3rd-5th grader chapter book and are loads of fun with a lot of humor. If you prefer a mystery series to history, there are quite a few great mystery book series that take place in Ancient Rome, Egypt and the Mediterranean.
I remember a comment under your video about grammatical articles and I was surprised that Croatian has a different case order than Polish; Polish; 1. nominative 2. genitive 3. dative 4. accusative 5. instrumental 6. locative 7. vocative Croatian; 1. nominative 2. genitive 3. dative 4. accusative 5. vocative 6. locative 7. instrumental
I have a Polish dictionary that has the paradigms listed with the vocative fifth in the singular, but with vocative first together with nominative in the plural. That's an exception though, all the other sources I saw use the order you listed.
@@modmaker7617 The dictionary in question was Słownik poprawnej polszczyzny (PWN 1980). Another fun order I saw is in the online dictionary Dobry Słownik, which uses nom-gen-dat-acc-LOC-INS-voc. Why? Because they can, that's literally the only reason they gave.
@@vytahThat's the traditional order used in Poland for most textbooks. The only exception here is Sanskrit, which sometimes uses the traditional Indian pattern for both nominals and verbs (3rd person, 2nd, 1st)
Another wonderful video, Luke! As a learner of a slavic language, i find N. G. D. A. More natural. It does kind of seem like the new order is trying to fix something that was never broken, but it also seems like there is nothing completely wrong with the new order either. I think it might also be up to personal preference - and possibly native language, as some languages do go N. A. But as you mentioned, in terms of trying to prove the new order as better than the classic order, there isn't much evidence. Its kind of like soup - some people prefer their traditional way of making it, and others prefer a modified way that suits them. Which way is better? It depends on the taste of the person.
"It does kind of seem like the new order is trying to fix something that was never broken, but it also seems like there is nothing completely wrong with the new order either." That's where I stand on it as well. "But as you mentioned, in terms of trying to prove the new order as better than the classic order, there isn't much evidence." Quite; I have been highly entertained by the attempts of a few zealous Englishmen in the comments to try to prove that their order is the better one.
In French speaking Switzerland we use the New because it has one big benefit : it's very similar to the German order. The german order is quite different : german only has 4 cases and are listed in the Nominative, Accusative, Dative, Genitive order because it offers multiple mnemotechnic to memorize the pattern, like in the adjective where a "saucepan" shape apear in this order. Since we need to learn German from an early age and we learn latin only later (towards, middle school, high school or even college) when you come to Latin it's quite natural then to have a Nom, Acc, Gen, Dat, Abl order since with the exception of the position of the genitive it's the same order than German's and you can then transfer skills you learnt in German lessons to Latin quite easily, among which grouping the declensions in shapes in your mind.
You're right, the brain definitely finds it easier to remember structured information versus unstructured! When you collapse some paradigms down, but not others, you make students have to memorizes heterogeous data structures for each declension, which hinders forming analogies with the other declensions (when in fact the matrix you showed is practically perfect for listing out the cases). When some words don't have a plural, for example, you can strike out an entire column at a time, which keeps the memorization efficient, right? Now you only need to remember "that there's no plural", rather than "Cell (x, y) is absent from the paradigm, cell (z, w) is absent...", which is basically what you get when you collapse paradigms.
That's a great way to put it: "When you collapse some paradigms down, but not others, you make students have to memorizes heterogeous data structures for each declension, which hinders forming analogies with the other declensions (when in fact the matrix you showed is practically perfect for listing out the cases)."
If the nominative and accusative are the most important, then I'd say that the positions that make the most sense for them are first and then last, not first and then second.
That's sort of how I see it too; bookending a pattern like this with key elements is very helpful. The introduction and conclusion of a paper, a book, a video are the most "important" parts, no?
Other people may have made this point, but in the UK the order Nominative, Vocative, Accusative, Genitive, Dative, Ablative has been used since the 19th Century for Latin and Greek (Greek without the ablative). The standard grammars for schools in the UK were written in that century - Kennedy for Latin and Abbott & Mansfield for Greek. Revisions and updates of these grammars are still in use, and new UK grammars such as those published by the Oxford University Press also follow this order. I can see arguments for and against both orders, but having grown up with the UK version, I stick with that in my mind. I don't think it matters that much which way the beginner chooses as there seem to be excellent grammars in both traditions. It is just something to be aware of.
In Belgium we were taught Latin using the new order (Nom - Acc - Gen - Dat - Abl (- Voc)). That's the way I'm used to it lol. Weirdly enough though, when in uni I had to learn the cases of older Dutch that are no longer (or hardly) used today we did learn those in the traditional order, being Nom - Gen - Dat - Acc.
I believe that Genetive first is in fact better, since many nouns or adjectives produce the "theme" of the word in the genetive case, which then allows them to be put in the next cases as well plural.
Ni tengo ganas de aprender latín pero I have been moving through Spanish and some Portuguese, just find these videos fascinating maybe I’ll pick some up via osmosis jajaja
Good now I have English again. The first book I learned a Latin from was an older English one, which used the new order. But the second one used the traditional order. I tend to lay out the declensions in the new order for my own thought process because it works better when comparing languages with case systems. having options on how to arrange a case system is beneficial for people who have studied multiple languages, and want to look at more, but that sort of flexibility could be confusing for a tyro. I prefer to see an entire system at once, with the understanding that we don’t have to learn all of it at once, rather than being presented, piecemeal, without any explicit mentioned that it is part of a system. I think perhaps I like the initial presentation of the whole system, because it gives me a chance to track my progress.
Spanish has a complex verbal conjugations but we simplified nouns greatly. When compared to all tbe declensions in Latin we only have inclesions for Gender (Male/Female) and Number (Singular/Plural).
Old English had a separate accusative case (hine), but it was lost during Middle English, with the dative (him) being used instead. The possessive in Modern English is an adjective in the first and second persons, but a genitive in the third. As the third person plural was borrowed from Norse, I had to look up Norse declensions to verify this. This is also true in Russian; мой and твой decline and agree with the possessed, while его agrees with the possessor and does not decline. I think this goes back to PIE, which didn't have real third-person pronouns. The German third-person possessive adjective (sein) was originally reflexive, as was the Spanish (su).
Those are not adjectives. Those are articles. Possessive articles. Second, German has two genitives for each person + the possessive article. Third, »his« etc. or »their« is not from Old Norse. Those have direct cognates in German dialects, e.g. the Frankish, where his = hess, while he is often her. Their is a direct cognate of German demonstrative plural genitive »deren«. The genitive for pronouns have -er suffix (meiner, deiner, seiner, etc.), or depending on context -s (meins, deins, seins), then there is the possessive article which is declines for person, gender and number ...
In school in England in the 1970s I was taught Nominative Vocative Accusative Genitive Dative Ablative. This was the same as the order in my Dad’s old textbook which he used in the 1940s. So I would challenge the idea that there was some generally accepted standard back in the day.
Thanks for the comment. I address the UK order, as you cite here, in the video. It has been around for 150 years. Before that the traditional order was the norm in England and everywhere, as Shakespeare attests.
For what little it's worth, neither system works all that well for Tocharian B, since the inherited cases are Nom Voc Gen Acc (which is my preferred order here). The Acc-final position is better here as Toch B has a number of secondary cases arising from contact with the "Altaic" languages which are appended onto the end of the accusative (typically called oblique).
I learned the modern order (N, V, A, G, D, A). I do like the idea of having genitive 2nd like the old order, but what I don't get is splitting up the dative and ablative like that. To me it always made sense to have those together since they have similar function: to/for v.s. in, by, with, from.
For me it depends on the language i use For sanskrit i prefer The traditional order of sanskrit which is basing on number prathamā (nom), dvitīyā (acc), tṛtīyā (inst), caturhī (dat), pañcamī (abl), ṣaṣṭhī (gen), saptamī (loc). while for greek and latin i prefer tradtional forms it was easier to learn. for russian i learnt with Nominative & Accusative ---> Genetive ----> Prepositional -----> Dative -----> Instrumental
Honestly, I'm for traditional order. It's convention, and I just got used to it. Any language I studiet, be it my native language or any forreign language, has the same order. Then I can add or remove the cases from the order, and have consistant sytem for them.
I'm a NAGD guy, part before that's how i learnt, part because the accusative can be the same as the nominative (such as on neutral nouns), and part because it's the main case in the latin to romance evolution, so it should be high in the list. And greek lost the lative and so did all romance (can't think of any exceptions) so it should come last (so you can drop it for modern greek without perturbing the order)
In my youth I learnt the "old order" both for Latin and Polish. That's how it was done. The new one, although pointing at similarities, so not without merit, grates on me. Incidentally, in Polish the ablation of Ablative is moved to Genitive, while the remaining functions of the case are split into Instrumental and Locative. The Vocative is still there, although it sounds increasingly archaic to Polish speakers.
Belgian here, and I learned Latin with the cases in this order: N V Acc G D Abl. Everyone I know who also learned latin used the same one, and I never heard of the other way around until today :o . I was, however, told the difference in endings between parisyllabics and imparisyllabics from the get-go, but I don't get why you say that ruins the syncretism. Yeah, you lose the last iteration for one groupe of identical endings, but it does not disturb the pattern in any way and you still get more syncretisms for that declension than with the traditional order.
![[Live] : ONE 168 วันนี้!! "โจนาธาน vs ซุปเปอร์เล็ก"](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/0jIN65KgJsI/mqdefault.jpg)
This is fascinating. In Polish, the way I was taught in school, the order is similar to the traditional Latin one: Nominative, Genitive, Dative, Accusative. Then instead of Ablative we have Instrumental and Locative. And at the end, of course, Vocative.
Indeed! The people who speak highly inflected languages and actually use cases in their lives, the Greeks, the Slavs, have no problem using a traditional order based on the ancient pattern. The syncretistic order seems to attempt to solve a problem that never existed.
I never heard of Rask before, but I'm 95% sure that he's a Swede. It's a typical Swedish name, usually given to soldiers in the 19th Century. Rask is Swedish for 'quick' or 'fast'. I have a similar name myself after a relative who was a soldier back then. Francis Dec is just my nickname on YT.
@@polyMATHY_Luke The only thing these alternative orders achieved is confusion when i started learning case names in English (Polish has translated original Latin terms) because they were listed in different order.
The same in Russian: NOMINATIVE, GENITIVE, DATIVE, ACCUSATIVE, (+ INSTRUMENTAL and PREPOSITIONAL).
The same in Romanian: nominative, genitive, dative, accusative, vocative. That was in the 70s-80s, when I was in school. But even now, I remember the questions you have to ask to distinguish between cases. Especially as genitive and dative are similar in Romanian.
While watching this video, the following poem came to mind:
The centipede was happy quite
Until the toad, in fun
Said “Pray, which leg comes after which?”
This raised her doubts to such a pitch
She fell exhausted in a ditch
Not knowing how to run.
Nice
I was taught nom., voc., acc., gen., dat., abl. back in the seventies, and our textbooks were printed that way. They were pretty old so it must have been current in the middle of the last century. We used to chant the declensions so they’re stuck in my head that way (even though I’m mentally correcting them all anyway now by adding the long vowels)
Yes, this order has been common in British Commonwealth countries and Denmark for more than a century.
I'm not even sure that the vocative was mentioned much. I remember the order as being nom., acc., gen., dat., abl., plus also voc., which is the same as nom. except in the 2nd declension masc. sing.. Why remember 6 cases when 5 + 1 exception works?
@@polyMATHY_Luke Exactly, so it's not exactly "new". And what is this business of marking long vowels, which was not done in any of the Latin that I remember?
I learnt the traditional order from _Alice in Wonderland,_ where Alice remembers ‘A mouse - of a mouse - to a mouse - a mouse - O mouse!’ from her sister's textbook. I don't know why the ablative (presumably ‘by a mouse’) is missing here, but it confused me when I found out that it existed.
Most probably the ablative wasn't included because the (Latin) ablative can serve about a ton of different purposes, some of them with prepositions some without.
I appreciate this, since Alice in Wonderland was written in 1865, which is yesterday in historical terms, yet Englishmen in the comments have frequently defended their current Latin case order as "traditional" because it's been around for 150 years. This quote shows it wasn't very long ago that the change occurred.
@@polyMATHY_Lukeas someone currently studying Latin in school in the England, the order we have learnt is nominative accusative genitive dative ablative. It’s in the Cambridge Latin Course
As well; the thing that makes learning it the ‘proper’ way more useful is that words in Latin dictionaries are listed nominative-genitive first.
That way you don’t confuse e.g. masculine second declension nouns (most of which end in -us in the nominative singular) and for example third declension neuter nouns (some of which end in -us in the nominative singular) or fourth declension masculine and feminine (which also often end in -us in the nominative singular).
That’s certainly how I feel about it
@@polyMATHY_Luke exactly.
I go to a secondary school in northern Argentina, and we always were taught with the Nom, Voc, Acc, Gen, Dat, Abl order. Didn't even know that there was another order.
Same here in Spain, early 80's
Same in Spain 2010s and 2020s
¿¿A qué secundaria vas que te enseñan latín??
@@lobodawolf7796 Es una escuela experimental de la Universidad de mi provincia
@@mateogutierrez4457 Dios mío, quiero ir allá, yo aprendiendo latín en Argentina me siento como una rareza exótica. ¿Cómo es la enseñanza?
I learned Latin declensions the traditional way, N, G, D, Akk., Abl., V (and still teach them that way). When we started with Greek, we used a grammar with NADGV, and initially, the teacher tried to make us memorize the declensions according to the book. However, we students automatically reverted to the order we were used to (minus the ablative, obviously) and found it easier to jump between lines than learn the new pattern. You make some valid points in your video (and I'm glad to hear I'm doing it "right" ;)), but I feel at the end of the day it's mostly about habit.
Well said, thanks for sharing. I’m the same way; it’s easier for me to apply whatever new book’s paradigms or new language’s declensions to the traditional order that is so familiar to me. Indeed, a matter of a habit.
Also in German you use the traditional order, because the genitive shows the declension paradigm. E.g.
nom: Friede (preace)
gen: Friedens (of peace) - here one sees that the other cases are declined with -en > dem Frieden, den Frieden. Or it helps to distinguish which noun is meant, e.g.
der Bauer (the builder) vs der Bauer (the pawn/peasant)
des Bauers (of the builder) vs. des Bauern (of the pawn/peasant).
I am definitely a "nominative/genitive/dative/accusative/ablative sort of guy! Thanks for a great presentation.
Thanks to watching!
When I started learning; I listed it Nominative-Accusative-Genitive then the rest (because those were the three I thought would be most used).
Then I switched to doing it the ‘correct’ way.
Very interesting! What caused you to change your habit?
@@polyMATHY_Luke well I thought doing it the nominative-accusative-genitive way would be a shortcut-a cheat if you will to learning the declensions (because I thought, perhaps rashly; ‘pffft, when am I going to need to use dative and ablative?!?’)
Then when I started getting deeper into the declensions (like, when I got to the third and fourth), and found all the nouns *also* ending in -us; and noticed they were always listed nominative-genitive in nearly all Latin dictionaries, I realised actually…doing it the ‘correct’ way is actually easier.
Ørberg has Nominative-Accusative-Genitive-Dative-Ablative and usually skips Vocative, but when I learned German in elementary and high school it was Nominative-Genitive-Accusative-Dative.
It comes to mind: modern Swedish mostly lacks grammatical genders, just like modern English, except in dialects, but the Old Swedish singular masculine accusative is now the "nominative". For example: 'någon'=someone, which is the grammatical gender "utrum" or "reale". In Old Swedish this was the singular masculine accusative, 'nokun', while the nominative was 'nokur'.
@@francisdec1615 when I learned German at my secondary school (I don’t know what the equivalent is in the US, but it’s 11-16, so high school-I guess?) they did it nominative-genitive, same when I did Latin at the same school.
I didn’t really understand it back then though because they didn’t really explain cases properly.
Same with the tenses-they’d throw words like ‘perfect’ and ‘pluperfect’ around, without explaining what they actually meant.
Way back in the 1980s I developed my own case order based on my obsession with Proto Indo-European studies: NVAGADIL.
I figured Nom, Voc, Acc formed a natural grouping, with genitive starting a new series: Gen, Abl, Instrumental, Locative. The last two case names are based on PIE studies. I even pronounce VAGADIL like vah-gah-deel as a memory device. I've always had a healthy respect for Sanskrit and the modern Slavic languages so my system works for me. I'm too old to change. 😁
Haha that’s fun
Huh that's really cool. I'm actually curious about PIE, did it have largely the same rules as Latin? Also how do you pronounce h1, h2 and h3 (pretend the numbers are small)?
Czech here. In Czech classes, the Czech cases are taught by their number, the names are (almost) not even mentioned (which is a mistake, I think, but that's not the point here). The order is
1. nominative
2. genetive
3. dative
4. accusative
5. vocative
6. locative
7. instrumental
When learning Latin, I actually have hard time thinking in terms of nominative, genetive... and not in terms of 1st case, 2nd case... So, for me the "old" order is totally natural, especially since the locative is in Latin "dissolved" into the dative (3rd - half of 6, which is remembered easily) and ablative (which is at "the end", just like locative), and instrumental maps pretty much 1:1 to the ablative, i.e. also being at "the end". Vocative is still sticking out there not at the end, but since our Slovak brothers and sisters just next to us don't have it (with Slovak and Czech being like 95% mutually intelligible), and since English is ubiquitous and also does not have it, it is not a problem.
Old order FTW 😀
Thanks for the comment! Yes, I feel the same.
An austrian professor said that at school they also only referred to the cases by a number of
While granting that there is a great deal of subjectivity involved, as Luke acknowledges at the end of the video (we tend to prefer whichever method we ourselves learned), my own experience with students is that they definitely find the "new" order (NVAcGDAb) easier to memorise. To quote Allen and Brink, in the study Luke quotes at 7:25, "The 'new' order has solid advantages, both theoretical and practical, over the 'old'." That is my opinion too, I must say. A teacher may face a dilemma, however, when the best textbook available (by every other criterion) uses the 'old' order. One solution is to use that book, but prepare "tables" of the declensions in the 'old' order and distribute them to the students. Or maybe author one's own text!
that's exactly what I ended up doing ... creating my own text. And like you, having made the switch to the new order, I do think it's easier on students.
Thanks for the comment!
""The 'new' order has solid advantages, both theoretical and practical, over the 'old'." That is my opinion too, I must say."
Allen & Brink take this position, but they don't support it, leaving it as self-evident. Could you tell us why it's easier to memorize? Teachers who use the traditional order, here in the comments and around the world, swear by the advantages of the classical sequence of the cases, and you and others of the UK and Commonwealth countries make the same argument that your system is the better one. Is this testable? Or could we all be wrong, and it's just subjectivity?
If you find a book you like but it has a different case order, as you said, then there is no reason to force yourself or the students to adapt to it; keep doing what you're doing, converting all the tables in the book to your preferred order as necessary.
it would be testable if everyone who teaches Latin tried switching to see if it made a difference. This is by no means scientific, but personally I've spoken to maybe 6-8 people who have switched from the traditional to the new order when teaching. A couple said it made no difference, the others all said that they felt that it was easier for students to learn with the New Order. I've never heard of anyone who switched the other way.
In Finnish, the cases are grouped by what their purpose is, usually in groups of 3:
For example, internal locative cases:
Inessive (inside of something) - talossa (inside a house)
Elative (coming from inside of something) - talosta (coming from inside of house)
Illative (going inside something) - taloon (going inside a house)
Finnish also has native names for cases, but foreigners are usually taught the Latin names
20:56 honestly this section convinced me of the syncreticists' position. Their orders actually do make a lot of sense.
In UK schools back in the 1950s and 1960s the order was always Nom, Voc, Acc, Gen, Dat and Abl
And that's still the standard for the UK: virtually all materials published in the UK use that order and publishers produce US editions with the classical order for sale over the Pond. So Morwood's _Oxford Latin Grammar,_ for example, has a UK and a US edition (I have a copy of each). If you're buying second hand on the internet from overseas, make sure you know which edition you are buying. The same with _Athenaze!_
That would explain why the Athenaze copies I have use the traditional order. Lol you Englishmen, why did you have to go messing up a good thing?! haha. j/k
This is so enlightening. I thought that there were two systems; British and American. My approach has always been: If you are using a British book, write the paradigms with the American system and vice versa. This is because I have to have ALL forms at instant recall, which should not depend on a “table” of words.
Excellent path! Probō!
Great video. Consider doing a video like this on verbs. As a portuguese native speaker I found strange that latin dictionaries prefer the first person singular as the default form of the verb, where in romance the infinitive seems to be viewed as the default form.
I think that part of Latin might also be modelled after Greek.
In Ancient Greek, verbs can be either 'thematic' aka o-verbs (meaning they add a stem vowel between the root and the ending) or 'athematic' aka mi-verbs (no stem vowel). These two categories have different present tense endings. Obviously this doesn't work in Latin, where all verbs are 'thematic' (except sum/esse and its derivations, as well as fero/ferre and its derivations)
Thanks! This is because Latin verbs show much more information in the first person singular. And in any case the first two parts go together: legō legere, moneō monēre, capiō capere, sentiō sentīre, this is what we need to figure the conjugation of the verb in present, future, and imperfect.
@polyMATHY_Luke
Which is the same reason we want to include the genitive form in our dictionary listings!
As an Indo-Europeanist first, and a classicist second, I tend to moreorless follow the Sanskrit order (albeit with the vocative moved to the start) because when discussing the evolution of case systems being able to see syncretisms clearly is especially useful
It generally maximises the syncretic forms placed adjacent to each other, but there are still ambiguities that leaves in the order (e.g. the nom-voc-acc can be permuted however you like without disrupting syncretisms, the oblique cases can be reversed, and there's also a limited amount of ambiguity within the order of the oblique cases as well)
Aesthetically I also like the idea of grouping cases by function, similarly to how it's often done in Uralic languages where the cases denoting syntactic relationships typically come first, then locative cases, and then various others. If we subdivided the syntactic relationships into those with verbs and nouns we might then get something like nom acc dat gen loc abl inst voc
regarding the nominative/genitive syncretism seen in many third declension nouns, this again seems less important from a diachronic point of view.
The endings are the same (for athematic nouns at least), but they do not generally have the same stem (although by the era of Latin, the root is at least almost always in the same grade), so it makes sense from a (diachronic) syncreticist PoV not to place the genitive between the nominative and accusative
It is however a good argument to go accusative, nominative, genitive though, although that would likely annoy enven more people!
An important argument at least in PIE, and perhaps for Sanskrit and others too, is that athematic stems show ablaut. Nom-voc-acc ("weak" cases) have one stem ablaut pattern, and the other ("strong") cases have another pattern. Therefore, if you want to show the full range of forms with just a few principal parts, you always have to show one weak case form and one strong case form. But on the other hand, in a declension table it makes sense to group forms using the same stem form together, i.e. showing the syncretism *in the stem itself*.
Thanks for the comment.
German was my first foreign language that had cases on words other than pronouns. I relied heavily on a handout that I bought at a bookstore that had a few dozen charts on it. From that, I learned the paradigm for the definite article in the order nominative, accusative, dative, genitive. I didn't ever question that, because it was all I knew, and because that's the same order that I think makes sense to teach cases. ("The boy" sees, The boy sees "the dog", The boy throws "the dog" a bone, The boy loves "his" dog. That seems like the natural progression of learning grammar.)
Years later I took three semesters of Koine Greek. Our textbook had (what I later learned was) the traditional order of nominative, genitive, dative, accusative. At first I tried memorizing in that order, but it just confused me because NADG was just so entrenched in my brain, so I ended up having to copy every single new declension that we learned into my notes in the order I was used to. (The "copy into my notes" part probably aided memorization, but the "make sure to copy it differently than the book has it" was annoying.) It was inconvenient, and when my classmates would ask me for help, or when I had to recite a noun in all its declensions in class, I would have to switch orders in my head.
All that to say this: The most important thing is consistency (which I think is pointed out well in this video), and the traditional order has been used for literally millenia. I always recommend to people that they learn cases in the traditional order, because then the majority of language-learning material will match what they're used to. I've accepted that any new language I learn with 4 or 5 PIE cases I'm just gonna have to reorder all the charts for myself into NADG. That's annoying and a waste of time. It would've been much better to have started out in the significantly-more-widespread order.
Anyway, thanks so much for long and informative videos like this. It always improves my day to see you (or Jackson or Simon) upload a 40+ minute video.
Interesting because I as a German was also taught the traditional order of nominative, genitive, dative and accusative in school.
In Germany you learn the traditional one, unless you are a DAF, which like to teach falsehoods about the language because they think it would make it easier to learn. The order is Nominative, Genitive, Dative, Accusative. The Genitive as second, because you simply then knows how to decline the other cases.
@@SchmulKriegerWhat is the falsehood here exactly? I don't see how the order of cases is true or false, it's just convention. You can argue which is better but it's no less true if you list a declension in the order NADG or NGDA
@@merchantmaker1771 they teach falsehoods like those declension of a noun aren't oblique cases because they are adverbs and such dumb stuff. Genitivus absolutus is often taught as an adverbal. It's not. Also prepositional object get taught often as adverbials which they aren't. But that's for the DAF.
Agreed! I would never expect someone to change after having ingrained a certain order. That consistency becomes the real long term benefit.
great, now I'm going to be chanting "a ae ae am a ae arum is as is us i o um o i orum is os is..." for the rest of the day.
same phenomenon as getting an old familiar song stuck in your head, I suppose.
edit: just got to the part where you mention it's like a song. right on.
When I see Accusative after nominative, I just get confused. For Latin, I'd do N G D Ablative, Accusative then vocative
Hmm, did I end up learning the new or the old order. Need to listen to this
I was taught Greek with the old system, with Vocative at the end. This goes for both modern and ancient. I'm not old enough to encounter Dative in modern though.We only use it in certain phrases now.
I teach in Australia where NVAGDA historically prevails and literally no one says ‘lupus lupum’. This problem is completely imaginary. As an example, everyone chants the verbs in o s t mus tis nt order but no one says ‘dico dicis’ when trying to supply a dictionary form. You learn dictionary forms (principal parts) and you learn paradigms. The first 2 words of each do not have to match. I learned Latin with NVAGDA and learned Greek with NGDAV, and did not notice a mite of difference. The goal in either case is to convert the linear table chant into automatic single item recall through lots of applied practice. My advice is simply, pick a system and stick with it, preferably one which you can easily get materials in. The choice is truly arbitrary and matters less and less in the long term.
Also: Yes I can attest, after teaching hundred of students I have literally never had a problem arise from student learning paradigms in the NVAGDA order. There is literally zero downside to using either traditional or nouveau order.
Agreed! You have a beautiful song on your channel; here it is for anyone who comes upon this thread: th-cam.com/video/HZ_U1k8oH6U/w-d-xo.htmlsi=K1p8gvpzyqWDt-Rc
I learned nom-gen-acc-abl (Latin) and same in Greek (minus abl of course). Of course then I ran into a Greek grammar book that was nom-acc-gen (but as "subject" "object" and "pos" case!) Dative didn't show until Ecce Romanae II andmodern Greek rarely uses it outside of canned expressions.
In modern Romanian nom-acc and gen-dat have merged and in modern Greek 3rd declension masc and fem nouns (but not neuter) have become 1st declension in demotic by way of accusitive forms such as Ellas to Ellada, metēr to metera, patēr to pateras by way of patera.
"Is that the second case,
or does it come in another place?"
This Roman got so good at English that he rhymes unintentionally.
I actually just bought the storylearning not even knowing you were the author of the couse...which i was very very happy.
Awesome! I hope you like it, thanks very much for giving it a try.
Spanish student here, well in 1982. Only one compulsory year of Latin. N - V - Ac - G - D - Ab
The order of the cases has been irrelevant to me so far because I'm not memorising a table. I'm just learning them through reading. I don't need to go through a table in my mind to find the correct case. I just learned them. It's a lot easier that way. I tried the memorisation approach but 10 minutes after repeating it I'd forget everything. But with the natural learning technique I don't even have to think about them that hard. It just makes sense in my head. Thank the gods I came across your video about LLPSI. It was life changing. I hadn't heard of the natural approach technique before that. Even when I was studying English I remember having to memorise a list of irregular verbs, their past and participle. It was kind of crazy looking back at it now. I'm going to use the natural approach for other languages now that I know how it works.
Indeed. This should be the goal of learning the language, right? Instead of seeing the tables in front of you, when you think about a case, you just know the case-endings in Sg. & Pl.. It then becomes irrelevant what order they are in. Familia Romana uses a different order, than the one I learned in school, but it doesn't matter, because you aren't memorizing the order, you are memorizing the individual cases through repetition in context (and the exercitia, of course).
That's awesome, I'm glad LLPSI has been of such value. However, memorization of the declensions was something done not only by literate native speakers of Latin and Ancient Greek, but is done today by native speakers of Polish, Russian, Croatian, Ukrainian, and many others. Equally, all Italian school children learn the conjugation patterns of all their verbs in school. Memorizing paradigms is very much a part of the "natural" experience. Please keep doing what you're doing if it works for you, but some methods might also be of use later on.
Rosa, rosae, rosae, rosam, rosa, rosa.
Breaks down into:
1) Greek cases before extra (in the case) Latin case(s)
2) Grammatical (or in sentence) Greek cases before Vocative (which is an exclamatory sentence on its own).
3) Subject-predicate or rectus case before oblique cases.
4) Oblique cases ordered according to Greek spatial connotations (from, in, to).
Belgium also uses the UK order. In our case it was tied to how it was taught in textbooks (start with simple subject-verb sentences, introduce sentences with a direct object, introduce posession, ...) but that's probably sort of incidental.
Thanks for the comment
In germany we learned it
NGDAV
Which seems to be the traditional model
I went to a half-German school in France, and in German, the most common order is nom., gen., dat., akk., while in Latin, we learnt nom., voc., acc., gen., dat., abl. as the order, and now I'm learning Icelandic, the common order of which is nom., acc., dat., gen. (or nf., þf., þgf., ef. in Icelandic)
In the 1960s we learned the Nom/Gen order. I find it more useful now to memorize also the Ablative when learning a new word because it also immediately tells me which declension the word belongs to. As soon as one memorizes the order of the vowels: A, O, I/e, U, E (capital meaning a long vowel), one can put the new word into its proper declension, which for me is more meaningful than trying to remember 1st, 2nd, etc. So, I learn Nom/Gen/Abl when learning vocabulary.
Very timely video for me as I’ve reached chapter 6 of LLPSI and determined it’s time to memorize the 1st and 2nd declensions.
I’m going with the traditional order.
Thank you
Awesome, naturally I favor that decision. Good luck! Keep up the hard work.
Personally I think it would make the most sense to list the Genitive form first, as that is the case that determines which declension a noun/adjective is in and always reveals what the stem is that can be used to make all the oblique cases.
I'd also prefer to list the infinite of verbs first and then the first person singular.
Sounds fine to me.
Love the content and background pictures, Luke!
Thanks for the comment and for watching! Glad you like it
Great Video Luke. The work you put into it shows your passion for the subject.Gratias tibi.
Et tibi grātiās!
I think it's kinda neat to have syncretic forms next to each other. Also, from a linguistic perspective, the new orders tend to go from more basic cases with a grammatical function to those with more semantic content.
Also, the Latin/Greek order has been carried over to other European languages, where I think it makes less sense. For instance in German, the nominative and accusative are always homophone, except for the masculine singular. From a linguistic perspective, it makes sense to say that German only distinguishes the accusative in the masculine singular. Yet, most people don't realize this, at it is obscured by the traditional order of cases, which gives the impression that the accusative is always a separate case and merely happens to sound the same as the nominative sometimes (in fact, most of the time). The situation is similar in Russian, though there it's the feminine singular that uniquely marks the accusative.
But yeah, for Latin and Greek there never really was a need to change the order
Thanks for the comment. Interestingly, Slavic speakers all strongly favor their traditional order. Naturally we all favor the thing we're used to, but it seems that our rationalization from outside the realm of native speakers (like the 19th century scholars with respect to Latin) is not very useful. The native speakers seem to like NOM-GEN. That's worth considering.
Thanks for this video. I discussed this once with a friend and I couldn't argue as well as you do. Greeks and Romans were used to memorising a lot more than us, so it's useful to assume that the traditional order is easier to memorise.
es, um, ibus, es, ibus
or
es, es, um, ibus, ibus.
Thanks for the comment. I am definitely of the opinion that the traditional order has more advantages. It's interesting how many millions of native Slavic speakers use the traditional order in their own languages.
I'd like to stress that it really comes down to the question how the paradigm is used - as a matter of fact I sometimes use different orders both as a teacher and a scholar!
When teaching I usually don't refer to declensions but to specific words, so I'd use the traditional order for most of the reasons you mentioned and because it is the prevalent one in my country. But when talking specifically about the declensions I often want to point to certain patterns within them, and I do that by putting identical forms next to each other so that my students can see at first glance where e.g. Nominative and Accusative are the same and where not. (This also means that I never omit any case but rather write identical forms of the example words over two spaces in the table.)
And finally, I usually use the traditional order for myself, but as soon as I take up any diachronic or comparative work I inevitably end up with the 'new' one, since the Indo-European 'strong' cases Nom Akk Vok (Sg.) indeed are grouped together morphologically and were mostly continued as these exact cases, while the other ones underwent complex merging and regrouping processes - so I need Gen Dat Abl Loc Inst next to each other and not separated by the Accusative in order to trace their evolution.
Overall, both systems have every right to exist, as always it is our task as teachers to use them to our students' advantage.
Well said.
Personally I prefer the variety of NGDAA rather than lumping together forms that tend to be syncretic; as you say in the video lumping together similar forms leads to imbalances across declensions and I would find that harder to memorize compared the generally synchystic nature of the traditional order, which maintains variety
Thanks for the comment!
Yes! So nice to hear you advocate for the traditional order. Strongly accustomed to N.G.D.A... in my mother tongue and other languages, and the LLPSI's order is so annoying :) And so is, for example, the order in Icelandic textbooks I've used, but I assume it's more of a general Germanic linguistics thing. I think, for a person who deals with mutiple inflectional languages, there needs to be a common ground for learning paradigms, for which role the traditional way of arranging cases is probably an obvious solution. It helps if you tend to visualize a matrix in your head when recalling declensions
I am used to the traditional paradigm. It's the same paradigm I learned with Russian and Irish. With Irish it makes even more sense to have genitive come directly after the nominative: the five Irish declensions are determined not by things like gender or word forms, but by how the genitive is formed. Now that I wish to learn Latin, and after watching this video, I just want to keep with what is familiar. I have stayed with it even with Sumerian which has cases that are not found in most Indo-European languages.
Good for you!
Very interesting! You presented this dry material well!👍
Haha thanks
In Lithuanian the declination of nouns, adjectives and pronouns is
In the classical order: nominative, genitive, dative, accusative, instrumental, locative, vocative. There are also a couple of non- obligatory locatives, such as place where to (illative) still used in several.dialects and in a higher style of the literary language. I learnt Latin and Greek with the classical order of cases: why change a good thing that works? I deplore the modernday tendency of change for changes sake.
It was an innovation of the 19th century. I'd hardly call it 'modern'
I would say that an illative is an innovation, not an old case.
The illative and addessive cases in Lithuanian are as old as the written literary language (1500's) but yes, they are considered an "innovation" compared to the other, inherited indogermanic cases.
Nominative and Genitive are the only cases I actually need for Latin in my work.
I have always used Indic numerals, when I need to denote case in Indo-European and Dravidian contexts, and I use Sanskrit order, because it covers most use cases in most of those languages.
The order is 1: Nominative, 2: Accusative, 3: Instrumental, 4: Dative, 5: Ablative, 6: Genitive, 7: Locative. It is very obviously ordered by syncretic values. A lot of endings are shared between cases in Sanskrit, especially in the dual and plural forms of most paradigms. (And, as noted, it is also identical to Rask's order.)
Vocative is somewhat lumped with Nominative, because the case endings only differ in the singular, but it's usually listed at the end of charts. I don't really have a standard denotation for it. Sometimes I use 0, sometimes [VOC]. I save my extra numerals for my non-Indo-European cases that still have decent overlap. For instance, my 8 is Mongolian's comitative or Malayalam's sociative case.
It's interesting that people care so much. I think it's a holdover from older language-learning methods, like having students recite declension tables out loud. I pretty much only use it as a notation device, when noting an unusual or markèdly non-English construction (in Sanskrit, you always fear *from* something, in the Ablative, but you love *on* something in the Locative). Or when a script or sandhi have so jammed words together that the word endings are no longer obvious, at a glance. I have long sinced moved away from table-chanting in favor of chunking and memorizing sentences that use all different words, but from the same paradigm.
I don't have this problem at all in languages that still have obvious and independent particles acting as function words, like Japanese fuzokugo. Parts of speech are built right into the language, so specifying with a number would feel silly. I wonder if there is a traditional order to the joshi particles, though.... 🤔
In Croatia we have N G D A V AB for learning latin.
When we learn Croatian, it's N G D A V L I, so same as Latin, only AB replaced with L I.
Greek is the same only without AB.
But when learning German we get N A and I'm not sure if it's then D G or G D
Also, we never skipped vocative. But I do remember that it was mentioned that there are different orders and I guess there might be some textbooks with different orders, but they are for sure much more rare
35 minutes in and this is my favorite video yet! Aside from the Halloween video where I learned about werewolf and how so many languages share words. A huge relization which opened my eyes. Gratias Luke.
Thanks so much, I'm glad you liked it. What do you like about it? I hope I keep making content that lives up to your expectations. Valē!
In my personal notes I always thought of nominative, vocative, and accusative as forming a natural general category, genitive as its own thing, and everything else as a third category. But if the order of writing out the declension is making a difference, you might learning the wrong thing.
In English, it is very natural to think of the nominative as the root form of a noun and all variations (e.g. plural) as derivations, but that doesn't make as much sense in Latin where the nominative is frequently the form which undergoes the most transformation compared to the others.
Indeed
I’m poring over Priscian’s *Institutiones Grammaticae* right now so I’m going to follow his order for learning the declensions - nominative, genitive, dative, accusative, vocative, ablative (this is the order given in book V, which is akin to the order set forth by Donatus - “casus nominum quot sunt? sex. qui? nominatiuus genetiuus datiuus accusatiuus uocatiuus ablatiuus.”).
As someone who has studied a little bit of latin and has created conlangs before. I think the order should be the nomitive form, the form the stem of the noun can be derived and the rest can come in any paradigm.
When i created a conlang, i chose to use the order Nom, Acc, Dat, and Gen with 2 extras that came at the end because not all nound had them and thus they could be dropped from the paradigm.
The reasoning for my order was really simple. The accusitive form could be used to find the stem of all masculine and feminine nouns. The exception was that all neuter nouns have the same singular nom and acc form. Thus you used the dat form.
This works and worked for my conlang becusse i made it. I think something like this could be applied to natural languages and certain paradigms could still be used like syncretized pairings.
I dont know. I think the best way is what works best for people. If a language has a paradigm where the base form of a noun was derived from the dative form, then that would work best because as with verbs, the stem is most important because it is what the endings are added to.
Thanks for the comment.
"Whom is this course for?"
Excellent!
For whom is this course? would have been the better version, though.
@@SchmulKrieger Not at all; English is quite flexible in this regard. The idea that prepositions must not be at the end is a prescriptivist idea derived from Latin popularized in the past two centuries. But while it's acceptable, it's certainly less "English".
@polyMATHY_Luke Exactly. English verbs, in many cases, are "two part" verbs. a verb joined with a preposition. The prep can appear almost anywhere in a sentence. This gives English a great deal of flexibility. E.g. Take on me, take me on. (But, interestingly,
not ontake me, which Latin often does).
Basically, English is not Latin. It has its own grammar.
In Spain, the standard order taught at schools is N, Voc, Acc, G, D, Abl. This has been the case for many decades, but I don't know when this tradition started.
Mid 20th century. It’s an extreme novelty in Spain.
@@polyMATHY_Luke It's specially good for Greek, in my opinion.
Thank you for this video! I have kind of been torn between which order I personally prefer, and you have definitely convinced me of the traditional one's greater utility. As you said in the conclusion, this is a rather minor concern, however - and in addition to what you said, I would like to add that I personally think it more pedagogically apt to stress commonalities between case endings across declensions (the m in the masculine and feminine of the accusative singular, the long stem vowel or -e for consonant stems in the ablative singular, etc.), which I have found much more helpful with the Latin students I've tutored because it helps reduce the load of memorizing all the declensions. The dative singular, for instance, always ends in ī, regardless of declension (with the footnote of phonetic developments in o and ā stems). I am not experienced enough to have a solid opinion on this, but based on what I've seen, I definitely prefer focusing on individual case endings over entire declension paradigms, and if declension tables are treated as being more something to look up in case of doubt than something that is actively incorporated into the classroom through, say, declension chants, that, of course, makes the order much less important. In that case in particular, though, sticking to the traditional order is definitely best, if only because it allows for easier acclimation into the world of dictionaries.
Thanks for watching the whole video, it's a long one, and I'm glad if it helped you in your quandry. Like I mentioned in the video, I had anticipated that the benefits of the syncretistic order would have been made plain by its advocates, but as far as I've read so far, the argument is entirely hypothetical on the part of the syncretists: syncretic forms next to each other are easier to memorize, and the traditional order is harder. But there is zero evidence of that. Allen & Brink convinced me that the syncretistic order is, if anything, slightly less useful than the traditional one. I was frankly surprised that two such brilliant men based their conclusion on 'having the genitive next to the nominative will make the student and future scholar believe they are more similar to each other than the nom to the acc.' That's what really pushed me in the other direction.
I agree with you: stressing the commonality of endings across declensions.
This is one of my biggest struggles and mind mistery. Here in Italy at school we learn declinationes in this exact order, as you said:
Nominative
- Genitive
- Dative
- Accusative
- Ablative
- Vocative.
And I always had HUGE difficulties to memorize them. BUT if I use the following order, I remember them muuuch better:
- Nominative
- Accusative
- Genitive
- Dative
- Ablative
- Vocative
I have no idea why it is so, but this is the sequence I remember better. And it's the sequence that comes in my mind first... and it's kinda a struggle because I always have to make one mental step more when I do my exercises...
I don't have a lot of experience with Latin, but I've worked with case systems before while conlanging (one of my conlangs has 26 noun cases- I have never felt as much like a mad scientist as I did fleshing out those grammar tables (I needed 2 bc I maxed out the size of the tables in the software I was using lol)).
Because of this, I tend to order cases in a way that makes it easier for me to remember what each case actually is, regardless of its inflection patterns. That way I can use similar orders regardless of language, or when starting to make tables for languages where I'm still building the inflection patterns.
For Latin, I would tend to favor something like Nominative, Accusative, Dative, Ablative, Genitive, Vocative, because 1) it puts the two most basic (in usage anyway) at the start, 2) all of the "object" cases are next to each other, with the two "indirect object" cases also next to one another, 3) Dative followed by Ablative makes it easier for me to remember which is which as an English speaker, given expressions like "to and from" tend to be in that order, 4) Genetive and Vocative are both neither subject nor object, so they sorta get tacked on at the end.
This way it also (sorta) follows case heirarchy (nominative < accusative/ergative < genitive < etc.), just with the dative and ablative moved up to be next to the accusative bc it's more intuitive for me that way.
A lot of people here seem to prefer the traditional way but it’s a matter of what you’re used to. I learnt the new order of cases and the traditional order just looks abhorrent to me 😅
Yup, and that's how the nouveau order looks to the traditionalists: abhorrent. Isn't that interesting?
I watched this all the way through. You give an excellent reason for beginners: what we see in the dictionary. I was interested in your comment about memorization. I have dyslexia and ADHD. I studied German for 11 years, plus a year of French and Ecclesiastical Latin growing up and now working on my third year of studying it formally. My whole adult life, I could use a dictionary to compose in German, I could read reasonably well and understand spoken German at about 85% content. However I’ve never learned to speak a language other than English because I cannot memorize. I have a masters in math and was SO good at my career at NASA because I was always proving the math, being unable to memorize formulas. I became astoundingly good at problem solving (and re-learning things I promptly forgot). Last year I began a story-based German program (a hilarious evil genius inventing a machine to forced everyone to wear lime green lederhosen and obey) where we had to defeat the foe. It involved travel words, everyday vocabulary and over the course, slowly increased the German and decreased English use. I did it for fun because I was going to be in Austria and Germany this summer with a daughter who spoke no German. To my immense surprise, after ten days (and a lifetime of study), I was able to translate street signs and ads without effort, and unknowingly sent a few texts home in German. Without thinking about it. My speech was still poor but obviously a connection was made in the brain that was long missed. I think your story-based Latin course will be a natural way to learn. I’m 69. I learned German with RECORDS in school, and with grammar books. Your kind of approach was very new. Our current Latin class (taught by my husband for our parish) uses Lingua Latinae Per Se Illustrata, the ecclesiastical version. It works well. But I would learn faster with more humor and inventiveness in the story line. I’m struggling to keep up because it requires more memorization that I am able to do.
By the way this is a family trait: my mother studied French and Hebrew, my dad, French. Both loved foreign languages but neither could memorize. I’m happy that my husband can and most of our children except the 3 with dyslexia. One learned French, German and Latin, managing to speak French in Germany, German in Italy and Latin in Greece. Not all brains are wired the same. But at least we love languages! A son who CAN memorize also learned Russian and Japanese, and a daughter Latin, Greek and Hebrew in addition to French and German. At least the rest of us try.
I learned the ‘nouveau’ way (NVAGDA) and the vocative was *never* omitted. But to answer one of your point, we would still memorise nouns with the nominative and the genitive, eg lupus, lupi as the ‘identity’ of the noun, and then the whole declension, eg lupus lupe lupum lupi lupo lupo. I remember that I actually appreciated having this little help in the middle of the declension since I already knew the genitive from the noun’s ‘identity’. This is sort of similar to what you said about how it makes it easier when you have previously-learned knowledge repeated in the middle of new things to learn.
Very interesting
*Part 6* (nearly finished).
3. Discussion.
The third most important reason for maintaining the traditional order descends somewhat into the farcical. The video envisions a student using the New Order asking a professor if a word is manus, manus, manum, manūs rather than “is it manus, manūs,” since of course if one uses the New Order, one has to include all the forms that occur between the principal parts (and the genitive in the New Order has been moved below the vocative and accusative). This would be like someone arguing that someone should indicate a conjugation of a word is by listing the entire present tense first before citing the infinitive.
And those are the three _most_ important reasons for keeping the traditional order!
I have to place my hand on my face like Captain Picard, because you simply are not listening to what I say in the video, nor reading my responses to you. The point of all this is indeed to be farcical - you use it as an accusation, but that's like pointing at a bird and calling it a bird. The purpose of the whole discussion was to show that the order of the cases doesn't produce any of the supposed benefits. I have repeatedly written this to you in every thread, and stated this clearly in the video itself.
Your writing and expressive skills are top noch, but your listening and reading comprehension seems to leave something to be desired, given the straw man you keep attacking.
Hi Luke, I think we're just talking past each other a bit to be honest. I've acknowledged that your point is that one is not better than the other. However, I also noted that while that was the stated argument, that your tone and condescension etc. expressed in the video make me believe that it's far more than that, and that you are actually a ticked off by the fact people use (and defend) the New Order. Certainly I couldn't think of anything else that would explain why you so savagely took the piss out of Allen and Brink when you mocked their accent, for example. But whether I'm right or wrong on this point (as I've acknowledged before), the fact is, you fundamentally attacked a straw man, for you made the entire video about morphological syncretism, while this was the secondary and complementary reason given by Allen and Brink. You say you read the article word for word three times, so I am lost as to how you failed to comprehend this.
When people don't use the Roman order (Nom., Gen.) it really grates in my ears.
I feel similarly. Though I try to accept them. It’s a British Commonwealth thing
If the scales of Western music theory can have modes, why not the declension schemes of Latin education?
---- Magister: "Decimus, your word is 'quercus'. Decline it Mixolydian-style."
---- Magister: "Mīles Davis Tertius, 'bucina'. Start Dorian, modulate to Aeolian, and bring it home Phrygian."
Here's another bit of trivia about case endings: most linguists who study the Indo-European languages collectively believe that the most primitive form of nouns is the accusative. The root form was simply spoken and the lips were snapped shut. This formed an "m" sound with thematic nouns and no sound at all with athematic nouns ending in a consonant like "kaput". The nominative came later. The other cases came later still and probably originated as short descriptive phrases uttered after the root form, similar to the way compound words are formed in Native American languages. I think people spoke a lot slower back then as well. A case ending like "-ibus" probably originated in a multi-word phrase thousands of years before the evolution of Latin.
That sounds plausible. The accusative is also treated as a ‘basic’ form of the word hence its use in Latin exclamations etc.
@@dragons123ismactually not. Because that's the perspective we have today because in many languages where case system is lost or reduced in inflection, the accusative becomes the nominative, such as in Modern Greek, where Hellas is the original nominative and Hellada is the accusative, nowadays the nominative is also Hellada. Default that s > d, like Greek poetas - poetad, and then tell me that the accustive is simply the root word, which totally wrong.
@@SchmulKrieger That all obviously supports my argument and I almost wrote as much in my original comment
@@dragons123ism how so?
@@SchmulKrieger The nominative form was eclipsed by the accusative form because the accusative was thought of as the 'basic' form of the noun, cf. its use in exclamations etc.
What makes the most semse to me N G and then everything else. Nom first because you need this form since the base is often so different from the nom (iter, itineris). Then the Gen because you use that to make all the other forms. I don't really care what order the D, Acc, Ab fall in. The vocative and locative can be ignored for the most part because they're rare and have very specific conditions where they're used.
When I learned German in college, the case tables were NADG. When I started learning Greek the next year, they were NGDA. I liked that much better.
The Germans themselves use Nom, Gen, Dat, Acc. I don't know why they always use this nonsense of Nom, Acc etc. for DAF (German as a foreign language).
@@SchmulKrieger Well, that's good to know. Not like I had any affection for my college German textbook anyway.
I did the UK N, V, Ac, G, D, Ab, and was a couple of years ago years old when I realised, first, that this wasn't universal and, secondly, that it was an innovation.
Learning German at the moment, and textbooks seem to divide between N, A, G, D and N, A, D, G. (Allerdings ist der Genitiv ohnehin auf dem Rückzug.)
I agree that one order or the other doesn't probably help memorisation a lot. I was taught the forms one by one, and accusative was first because it was easy to form simple sentences with it. I think ablative came next 🤔 We didn't try to memorise them in a list without context. Perhaps it's because I'm Finnish and Finnish language has 16 cases in a very different system than the Indo-European system. We can't really compare the case systems for similarities. And in Finnish classes, it wouldn't make sense to rote learn a list of 16 cases both singular and plural. We focus on small parts of the list and try to make sense of individual cases.
Thank you for this explanation! I learned the traditional order of cases in the '80s, NGDAAV. Some time ago I wanted to help my daugther studying latin and I was confused with the different order they use nowaday in the school (here in Ticino, Switzerland). I think, too, that learning together N,G is very useful (something similar in German, where it's important to learn the singular and plural form together).
Very interesting! I understand that German schools maintain the traditional order. Switzerland may be receiving some influence from France where the UK order is gaining ground.
I was accustomed to Nom,acc,dat,gen from learning more germanic languages. But when I started learning latin I switched over to Nom,gen,dat,acc,abl,voc. It kinda helped me to keep it separate from the other languages I was learning so it worked out.
I’d also like to mention something that I found very helpful in studying Latin. I read both of Henry Winterfield’s Detectives in Togas books which helped with context on Ancient Rome, and later read all of Colleen McCullough’s Masters of Rome series (beware the first book is colorful) but I came to a very natural understanding of naming conventions, pronunciation of common Latin words and their use, as well as a good grasp of history, on which I later did more reading, and continue to do. I recommend both sets of books. Henry Winterfield’s books are akin to a 3rd-5th grader chapter book and are loads of fun with a lot of humor. If you prefer a mystery series to history, there are quite a few great mystery book series that take place in Ancient Rome, Egypt and the Mediterranean.
I could tell within 30 seconds. You're a good teacher bro God bless you.
Many thanks
I remember a comment under your video about grammatical articles and I was surprised that Croatian has a different case order than Polish;
Polish;
1. nominative
2. genitive
3. dative
4. accusative
5. instrumental
6. locative
7. vocative
Croatian;
1. nominative
2. genitive
3. dative
4. accusative
5. vocative
6. locative
7. instrumental
I have a Polish dictionary that has the paradigms listed with the vocative fifth in the singular, but with vocative first together with nominative in the plural. That's an exception though, all the other sources I saw use the order you listed.
@@vytah
That's weird as a native speaker of Polish, I've only seen this case order. The one I listed.
@@modmaker7617 The dictionary in question was Słownik poprawnej polszczyzny (PWN 1980). Another fun order I saw is in the online dictionary Dobry Słownik, which uses nom-gen-dat-acc-LOC-INS-voc. Why? Because they can, that's literally the only reason they gave.
@@vytah
Alright then
@@vytahThat's the traditional order used in Poland for most textbooks. The only exception here is Sanskrit, which sometimes uses the traditional Indian pattern for both nominals and verbs (3rd person, 2nd, 1st)
Another wonderful video, Luke!
As a learner of a slavic language, i find N. G. D. A.
More natural.
It does kind of seem like the new order is trying to fix something that was never broken, but it also seems like there is nothing completely wrong with the new order either.
I think it might also be up to personal preference - and possibly native language, as some languages do go N. A.
But as you mentioned, in terms of trying to prove the new order as better than the classic order, there isn't much evidence.
Its kind of like soup - some people prefer their traditional way of making it, and others prefer a modified way that suits them. Which way is better? It depends on the taste of the person.
"It does kind of seem like the new order is trying to fix something that was never broken, but it also seems like there is nothing completely wrong with the new order either."
That's where I stand on it as well.
"But as you mentioned, in terms of trying to prove the new order as better than the classic order, there isn't much evidence."
Quite; I have been highly entertained by the attempts of a few zealous Englishmen in the comments to try to prove that their order is the better one.
In French speaking Switzerland we use the New because it has one big benefit : it's very similar to the German order. The german order is quite different : german only has 4 cases and are listed in the Nominative, Accusative, Dative, Genitive order because it offers multiple mnemotechnic to memorize the pattern, like in the adjective where a "saucepan" shape apear in this order. Since we need to learn German from an early age and we learn latin only later (towards, middle school, high school or even college) when you come to Latin it's quite natural then to have a Nom, Acc, Gen, Dat, Abl order since with the exception of the position of the genitive it's the same order than German's and you can then transfer skills you learnt in German lessons to Latin quite easily, among which grouping the declensions in shapes in your mind.
You're right, the brain definitely finds it easier to remember structured information versus unstructured! When you collapse some paradigms down, but not others, you make students have to memorizes heterogeous data structures for each declension, which hinders forming analogies with the other declensions (when in fact the matrix you showed is practically perfect for listing out the cases).
When some words don't have a plural, for example, you can strike out an entire column at a time, which keeps the memorization efficient, right? Now you only need to remember "that there's no plural", rather than "Cell (x, y) is absent from the paradigm, cell (z, w) is absent...", which is basically what you get when you collapse paradigms.
That's a great way to put it: "When you collapse some paradigms down, but not others, you make students have to memorizes heterogeous data structures for each declension, which hinders forming analogies with the other declensions (when in fact the matrix you showed is practically perfect for listing out the cases)."
I prefer NVAcGDAb order. I think it is the prevalent in Portuguese textbooks.
If the nominative and accusative are the most important, then I'd say that the positions that make the most sense for them are first and then last, not first and then second.
And why are they the most important?
That's sort of how I see it too; bookending a pattern like this with key elements is very helpful. The introduction and conclusion of a paper, a book, a video are the most "important" parts, no?
Other people may have made this point, but in the UK the order Nominative, Vocative, Accusative, Genitive, Dative, Ablative has been used since the 19th Century for Latin and Greek (Greek without the ablative). The standard grammars for schools in the UK were written in that century - Kennedy for Latin and Abbott & Mansfield for Greek. Revisions and updates of these grammars are still in use, and new UK grammars such as those published by the Oxford University Press also follow this order. I can see arguments for and against both orders, but having grown up with the UK version, I stick with that in my mind. I don't think it matters that much which way the beginner chooses as there seem to be excellent grammars in both traditions. It is just something to be aware of.
Well said.
In Belgium we were taught Latin using the new order (Nom - Acc - Gen - Dat - Abl (- Voc)). That's the way I'm used to it lol. Weirdly enough though, when in uni I had to learn the cases of older Dutch that are no longer (or hardly) used today we did learn those in the traditional order, being Nom - Gen - Dat - Acc.
Interesting. Thanks.
I believe that Genetive first is in fact better, since many nouns or adjectives produce the "theme" of the word in the genetive case, which then allows them to be put in the next cases as well plural.
That's how I feel.
and then go back to the different accusative stem? doesn't make ANY sense
Such an interesting video! Thanks!
Thanks, Jason!
Ni tengo ganas de aprender latín pero I have been moving through Spanish and some Portuguese, just find these videos fascinating maybe I’ll pick some up via osmosis jajaja
Good now I have English again. The first book I learned a Latin from was an older English one, which used the new order. But the second one used the traditional order. I tend to lay out the declensions in the new order for my own thought process because it works better when comparing languages with case systems. having options on how to arrange a case system is beneficial for people who have studied multiple languages, and want to look at more, but that sort of flexibility could be confusing for a tyro.
I prefer to see an entire system at once, with the understanding that we don’t have to learn all of it at once, rather than being presented, piecemeal, without any explicit mentioned that it is part of a system. I think perhaps I like the initial presentation of the whole system, because it gives me a chance to track my progress.
Yes. I agree.
Thanks for the comment.
Great video! However, slight correction, at 12:09 , accusative of rosa is missing the m.
You're right! My bad
Spanish has a complex verbal conjugations but we simplified nouns greatly. When compared to all tbe declensions in Latin we only have inclesions for Gender (Male/Female) and Number (Singular/Plural).
Old English had a separate accusative case (hine), but it was lost during Middle English, with the dative (him) being used instead.
The possessive in Modern English is an adjective in the first and second persons, but a genitive in the third. As the third person plural was borrowed from Norse, I had to look up Norse declensions to verify this. This is also true in Russian; мой and твой decline and agree with the possessed, while его agrees with the possessor and does not decline. I think this goes back to PIE, which didn't have real third-person pronouns. The German third-person possessive adjective (sein) was originally reflexive, as was the Spanish (su).
Those are not adjectives. Those are articles. Possessive articles. Second, German has two genitives for each person + the possessive article. Third, »his« etc. or »their« is not from Old Norse. Those have direct cognates in German dialects, e.g. the Frankish, where his = hess, while he is often her. Their is a direct cognate of German demonstrative plural genitive »deren«.
The genitive for pronouns have -er suffix (meiner, deiner, seiner, etc.), or depending on context -s (meins, deins, seins), then there is the possessive article which is declines for person, gender and number ...
In school in England in the 1970s I was taught Nominative Vocative Accusative Genitive Dative Ablative. This was the same as the order in my Dad’s old textbook which he used in the 1940s. So I would challenge the idea that there was some generally accepted standard back in the day.
Thanks for the comment. I address the UK order, as you cite here, in the video. It has been around for 150 years. Before that the traditional order was the norm in England and everywhere, as Shakespeare attests.
For what little it's worth, neither system works all that well for Tocharian B, since the inherited cases are Nom Voc Gen Acc (which is my preferred order here). The Acc-final position is better here as Toch B has a number of secondary cases arising from contact with the "Altaic" languages which are appended onto the end of the accusative (typically called oblique).
Very interesting
"Invītātiō, invītātiōnis, invītātiōnī, invītātiōnem, invītātiōne."
"Quid facis?"
"Invītātiōnem dēclīnō."
Quam rīdiculum! 🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣
Placet!
I learned the modern order (N, V, A, G, D, A). I do like the idea of having genitive 2nd like the old order, but what I don't get is splitting up the dative and ablative like that. To me it always made sense to have those together since they have similar function: to/for v.s. in, by, with, from.
For me it depends on the language i use
For sanskrit i prefer The traditional order of sanskrit which is basing on number
prathamā (nom), dvitīyā (acc), tṛtīyā (inst), caturhī (dat), pañcamī (abl), ṣaṣṭhī (gen), saptamī (loc).
while for greek and latin i prefer tradtional forms it was easier to learn.
for russian i learnt with
Nominative & Accusative ---> Genetive ----> Prepositional -----> Dative -----> Instrumental
Honestly, I'm for traditional order. It's convention, and I just got used to it. Any language I studiet, be it my native language or any forreign language, has the same order. Then I can add or remove the cases from the order, and have consistant sytem for them.
With 6!=720 orderings when including Voc and 5!=120 when not including it, they have so much arguing to do.
These Romans are crazy!
I'm a NAGD guy, part before that's how i learnt, part because the accusative can be the same as the nominative (such as on neutral nouns), and part because it's the main case in the latin to romance evolution, so it should be high in the list.
And greek lost the lative and so did all romance (can't think of any exceptions) so it should come last (so you can drop it for modern greek without perturbing the order)
In my youth I learnt the "old order" both for Latin and Polish. That's how it was done. The new one, although pointing at similarities, so not without merit, grates on me. Incidentally, in Polish the ablation of Ablative is moved to Genitive, while the remaining functions of the case are split into Instrumental and Locative. The Vocative is still there, although it sounds increasingly archaic to Polish speakers.
It's not that they split, it's that they never merged with ablative in the first place.
In the Italian school the vocative was always before ablative
Belgian here, and I learned Latin with the cases in this order: N V Acc G D Abl. Everyone I know who also learned latin used the same one, and I never heard of the other way around until today :o .
I was, however, told the difference in endings between parisyllabics and imparisyllabics from the get-go, but I don't get why you say that ruins the syncretism. Yeah, you lose the last iteration for one groupe of identical endings, but it does not disturb the pattern in any way and you still get more syncretisms for that declension than with the traditional order.