Nominative and/vs accusative noun cases in English lang.

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I didn’t understand them at all. I already try to find online but their sxplainations isn’t that good for me.(I am also learning Arabic noun cases, if it helps to make better explaination) THANKS!!!

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Anonymous 0 Comments

The nominative case and the accusative case, in their simplest forms, are used to indicate what part of the sentence is the subject of the sentence (the thing doing the verb – nominative) and the object (the thing that the verb is done to – accusative).

For example:

> The dog saw the cat.

In this example, the dog is the subject (it’s doing the seeing), while the cat is the object (it is being seen). In English, *word order* is typically used to indicate which noun is the subject and which is the object. So, switching the nouns (The cat saw the dog) completely switches the meaning of the sentence. However, in some other languages the word order doesn’t matter as much – instead the subject/object is indicated by adding a suffix to the noun. Latin, Old English, and many other modern languages use this instead of word order to indicate grammatical function.

As a hypothetical example, I will declare that any noun in English that is the subject of a sentence will now end with an -o, while the object will end with an -a.

Now the sentence becomes:

> The dogo saw the cata.

But I can rearange the order without changing he overall meaning.

> The cata saw the dogo.

The dog is still the subject (it’s doing the seeing), even though it appears at the end of the sentence since I have this modifier at the end. I can even rearrange things to be even weirder:

> saw the cata the dogo

or

> the cata the dogo saw

This is how Old English (and ancient Latin) *used* to work. Overtime, in English, these modifiers were mostly lost and replaced with word order. I say mostly because the most notable example of these nominative/accusative modifiers still existing is in English pronouns. I/me. He/Him/. She/Her. The differences between these pronouns is the first one indicates the subject, while the second indicates the accusative. We kept these from the olden days – but now word order matters so we have to place them in the right place.

> I saw him.

That sounds right.

> Me saw he.

That does *not* sound right – even though our word order should take care of it and it shouldn’t matter. The reason it sounds wrong is because the wrong noun cases are being used, and the cases for our pronouns have been preserved. So we have a weird disagreement where we’re using the wrong word in the right place.

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