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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If a noun is in the “nominative” it usually means it is doing things. It is the subject of a verb.
If a noun is in the “accusative” it usually means it is having things done to it. It is the object of a verb.
> The dog chased the rat.
“the dog” is the thing doing stuff (subject).
“the rat” is the thing having stuff done to it (object).
So “the dog” would be in the nominative case and “the rat” would be in the accusative.
The opposite would be:
> The rat chased the dog.
This sentence has the opposite meaning.
In many languages different cases are marked by changing the words a bit. Each noun will “decline” by having different versions for different cases, often following similar rules. English lost most of this (although we still split most nouns by singular and plural – so “dog” and “dogs”), instead we use the word order to work out which noun is doing things and which noun is having things done to them (not all languages do this – in some word order is used more for emphasis).
If English worked differently maybe we would add “nom” to the end of nouns to show they are nominative and “ac” to show they are in the accusative case. So we could say:
> The dog*nom* chased the rat*ac*.
> The rat*nom* chased the dog*ac*.
It also meant that if we said:
> The dog*nom* the rat*ac* chased.
> The rat*ac* the dog*nom* chased.
we would know what we meant (that it was the rat being chased). We wouldn’t need to rely on the word order.
However, there are some words we use that do decline: notably pronouns.
> I chased them.
> They chased me.
“I” is the nominative form of this word, while “me” is the accusative. Saying “me chased them” would sound incorrect, because “me” is the accusative of this word, not the nominative. Similarly with “they” and “them” – “them” is the accusative, “they” the nominative. We/us, he/him she/her. These are each the same word, just different forms of it (really I/me/we/us are all the same word – nominative singular/accusative singular/nominative plural/accusative plural).
They don’t follow a neat pattern (general rule in language – words that are used the most tend to be the most irregular). It also doesn’t work for “you”, where “you” is the nominative and accusative (and singular and plural).
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There are a few other cases. The genitive is a big one, usually linking something to another thing; so “my” is the genitive of “I”; “my banana” means “the banana that belongs to me.” There is also a dative case tends to be used for indirect things, where we would use prepositions in English – so in “He gave the book to me” “He” is the nominative (the thing doing stuff), “the book” is the accusative (the thing having stuff done to it) and “to me” is the dative, something not directly involved in the “giving” but linked to it.
As a general rule, if you want to know whether something is nominative or accusative think about whether you would replace it with “I” (nominative) or “me” (accusative).
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