rhonadin: afunnythinghappens: foundinantiquity: Two birds with one stone: I’ve been keen to ge
rhonadin:afunnythinghappens:foundinantiquity:Two birds with one stone: I’ve been keen to get good at writing in early bookhand Latin uncial (around 6th century AD), so I’ve been practicing the script by writing out grammar tables.I learned my charts nom-gen-dat-acc-abl-(voc) in high school, then in this manner nom-acc-gen-dat-abl in college. It severely messed me up, and it forced me to do what I hadn’t done in the first place: create meaning from the cases.nom-gen-dat-acc-abl is the only proper order! I must admit though that I didn’t really know anything else was done. It sounds like the pain ended up being helpful thoughpathei mathosI did worry this might open a can of worms. I might share what I learned about the case orders.I’m Australian, and most of the people I met in Australia and in the UK when I studied over there used this order, the Nom-(Voc)-Acc-Gen-Dat-Abl system. However, it seems that in North America, the Nom-Gen-Dat-Acc-Abl-(Voc) system is more common. The NGDAA(V) is also more common in Germany, according to a German Latin teacher I once had. The NGDAA(V) is the traditional case order. And by traditional, I mean that it was first devised by Roman grammarians based on Greek models. Dionysius of Thrax wrote the earliest surviving Greek Grammar textbook, and in it he listed the Greek cases in the order Nom-Gen-Dat-Acc-Voc.The Romans wanted to use more or less the same order as the Greeks when they wrote out their noun tables, but there’s a problem: Latin has one more case than Greek, the ablative. So initially the ablative was just put at the end, after the vocative. But since the Latin vocative is so often the same as the nominative, it is usually not written out in tables, which eventually led to the practice of placing the vocative at the very end of the case order as an optional addendum. Thus, NGDAA(V) was born.The alternate system, Nom-(Voc)-Acc-Gen-Dat-Abl, is comparatively recent (though pretty much everything is comparatively more recent than Dionysius of Thrax). It dates at least as far back as the 19th century Danish Latin Grammarian Madvig. It was intended to be a more logical way of learning Latin, since it groups together similar cases. For example, it’s easier to see right away that all neuter nouns are the same in the nominative and accusative, or that the dative and ablative often look the same.I find that’s what makes Latin word endings a bit trickier than Greek endings. A lot of them (-o, -ae, -i, -a, -ibus) could indicate more than one case. In theory, learning that the dative and ablative look the same in many instances should help students to be wary of deciding on the wrong case while they’re in the middle of translating a sentence, which can throw people off.I actually can’t confirm that hypothesis in practice, though, since I’ve only tutored students in the N(V)AGDA order, the one I learned myself. For some reason I feel very loyal to the N(V)AGDA of my childhood.But even I must admit, paradigms are a means to an end - as long as you learn what your cases mean and remember how to spot them all, it doesn’t matter what order you write them out. :) -- source link
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