Grammatical Cases: Why are they considered so hard?

[Josquin]

Are you even interested in what I write?

There are no seven cases for the Latin adjective. Just take a grammar of Latin and go count. Good luck!

I'm out of this discussion now. I can hardly believe I'm having this conversation anyway...

[Iversen]

I think we all can hope that the discussion has ended. But...

There is a global consideration to take into account here which isn't limited to Latin. The point is that some languages had more cases in earlier times and still have kept some fossilized forms from the good old days. In Latin and some Slavic languages the vocative mostly has the same endings as the nominative, but there are still areas where it is productive - like in the masculine singular in Latin. This means that if you come with a name ending ind -us in the nominative you can safely assume that it has a vocative ending in -e. And therefore we have to accept a vocative case in Latin.

Not so with the old locatives mentioned by Josquin: because they are restricted to a few fixed town names and small islands it may be too much of a burden to retain a locative case in all your tables (as even Wikipedia does), when you can choose to treat these few forms as exceptions to the regular ablative form, either on the morphological level or on the syntactical level, I don't care. It should be the ease for learners that determines what you choose here - but of course these exceptions should be mentioned in dictionaries and grammars, and here you can add footnotes with the reasons for their aberrant forms (and that's the only place where you need to use the word 'locative' in a Latin grammar).

BUT ...... the fact is that the singular locative forms (when they are used) look like either genitive singulars ( 1. and 2. declension) or datives (3. declension) or the ablative (4. and 5. declensions), and if you think it is easier to point this out by retaining a locative for the few words it applies to then it is not wrong to do so. There are other cases there a certain case is retained in spite of not having a single ending of its own, simply because it borrows its forms from more than one location in the system. That's in fact the only reason for keeping a separate accusative in the description of the Slavic languages. If it always was identical to either the nominative OR the genitive then you could simplify the system by scrapping it.

Similar considerations based on Occam's razor can of course be used on other wordclasses. For instance I don't think that we have added any new strong verbs to Danish since the migration era around 400 AD, but since there so many of them it is simpler to keep a category called "strong verbs" (with some kind of Umlaut and no ending in the past tense) than it would be to treat them all as irregular variants of the table for regular verbs. Similarly I doubt that many new substantives entered the 4. and 5. declension in Latin since the early Republic or even earlier, but we keep these categories in our grammars because it may be the easiest way to describe the fossilized words in them - and maybe also because we have become accostumed to doing things like that. That being said: if I had to devise a Latin grammar from scratch I would be seriously tempted to scrap the 5.declension because it contains so few words.

I suppose most language learners grudgingly accept the categories in their grammars, but my own mindset is such that I try to use Occam's razor even in cases where it leads to fundamental changes in the traditional categories. And this has of course also something to do with my penchant for making green grammar sheets with a clear separation between regular tables for regular words and secondary tables in list form for everything else.

[Random Review]

"A fully declined Latin adjective would have two numbers, seven cases, and three genders, or forty-two forms, of which you will most likely need to learn thirty..."

All you need to know is the nominative singular and maybe the genitive singular, if there are stem changes. All other forms are regular and can be derived.

Can you imagine if we did this with Romance verb systems?!
"The Spanish verb has exactly 5,897 forms, each of which must be learned for 3 regular declensions and individual irregular verbs..."

OK, I made that number up: screw actually multiplying 3 persons then by 2 numbers by 3 tenses and then allowing for 3 moods and 2 aspects (but these not in all tenses, so the maths gets complicated ).
Actually this is what bad teaching does.

And yet, thanks to Michel Thomas and Margarita Madrigal, I found the Spanish verb system fairly reasonable and so full of patters as to be only moderately difficult, even those irregular verbs.
I bet there must be people teaching Slavic cases in a similar logical way and I know FSI did that with the German ones.

So, why is the German case system so difficult for some of us? I see two reasons: 1) A confusing set of units including some that are identical in form but different in meaning and 2) in certain parts, notably with prepositions, a lack of meaning other than grammatical. I should also say in passing that the exact same thing could be said about the French verb subjunctive subsystem that is notoriously difficult to master.

To see what I mean when I speak about grammatical meaning, let's look at the following examples:

1) *Das war ein gut Jahr
2) Das war ein gutes Jahr
But the fundamental question is what information does the -es in gutes carry in 2) that is not in 1). In terms of semantic meaning, absolutely nothing.

I think a distinction has to be made here between carrying no information and carrying redundant information, mate. All languages have redundancy and indeed all communication systems need it. In your example, "gutes" does carry information; it's just that this information is recoverable elsewhere in the sentence in ways that we (as English speakers) are more used to.
That the German language "wants" some redundancy for this information is borne out by Josquin's correction:

* eines gutes Jahr --> ein gutes Jahr

It is precisely because the indefinite article doesn't carry this information in your example that the adjective has to. If we use the definite article, it doesn't need to anymore and reverts to the weak declension! As I understand it that is what the weak declension is: what you do when you don't need the adjective to carry so much information because it's on the determiner.

Das gute Jahr

If you approach all this as arbitrary and meaningless, it will seem unfathomably baroque (why on earth to adjectives have to have strong and weak declensions?!); but if you view it as carrying meaningful (albeit almost always redundant in the modern language) information, it all makes perfect sense.

An analogy: if I came to you and said that French adjective gender agreement was meaningless because the gender information is already on the noun, you as a Francophone would surely put me right about that.

Regarding the fact that a small number of endings are recycled with different meanings, yes this can be confusing if you aren't careful. I would again urge you to always look at the pronoun system when learning the cases on determiners and adjectives and this will help you keep it all separate. Keep asking yourself what pronoun the noun phrase corresponds to as an intermediate step until the entire system has become second nature. Even if you know the answer without it, take the time to look at the pronoun anyway and this will stop you getting confused when the same ending is used for a different gender/case later.

[tastyonions]

Declension at least allows flexibility in sentence structure that wouldn’t otherwise be possible. What exactly does gender grant a language? The (very, very rarely used) possibility to recycle the “same” word for two or three different meanings by altering its gender? It’s kind of a mystery to me why it would evolve at all. I guess in some ancient age it probably carried semantic weight that has long since been lost...instead now acting mostly as a way to catch out non-natives who have otherwise mastered the language.

[Arnaud]

The 15 cases of the russian language
In fact, for me, it made more sense to learn the "Местный падеж" rather than to learn the "second locative" or whatever its name is in the grammar books. Same thing for the "Разделительный падеж", or "second genitive" that works more or less like a french partitive.
It's easier to remember the "exceptions" this way, in fact, as the logic of the system and the historical evolution of the language appear more clearly, imho.
Often cases are not explained correctly: to take again the exemple of the "Местный падеж", the only explanation (when there was one) I read in the french grammar books for beginners was "because the words are short"... (yes в аэропорту is short !!)

[Chung]

I have to say that I'm enjoying this debate, all the more so that I actually like learning the German case system. I have no idea why people think that calling something arbitrary and devoid of (semantic) meaning means that I'm suggesting not learning to use the system as it is today. Regardless of what I may think of the system I'm not preparing for the exam by ignoring the cases and hoping that the examiner will like my Tarzan German. Nothing could be sillier.

That said, I'm trying to answer the OP's question "Why are they (grammatical cases) considered so hard?". My only recent experience with cases is with German. I can't discuss how cases work in Russian, Polish or Hungarian. So, my approach to the question is really why is the German noun case system considered hard and why all observers consider it probably the most difficult part of German for English or French speakers (my situation) to learn.

As a language teacher myself, I see every day how certain subsystems of a language are more challenging than others, depending on the linguistic background of the learner and on the workings of the subsystem. So, for example the speaker of English finds the French grammatical gender subsystem very challenging. I won't try to explain why here except to say that I think the same issues or arbitrariness a lack of (semantic) meaning apply. That's another debate but I will add that the whole system is now undergoing a major change because of a movement to make the language less sexist and more gender neutral or egalitarian.

So, why is the German case system so difficult for some of us? I see two reasons: 1) A confusing set of units including some that are identical in form but different in meaning and 2) in certain parts, notably with prepositions, a lack of meaning other than grammatical. I should also say in passing that the exact same thing could be said about the French verb subjunctive subsystem that is notoriously difficult to master.

I'd venture that you're simply coming to terms with your first language that takes case-marking beyond the relatively limited scope of that feature in languages that you already know. It gets less perplexing the more you get into German or dig into more languages that don't do things like English, French or Spanish. Trust me. I went through something similar when taking on Latin with a background in just English and French ("What's this Latin accusative, genitive, dative, ablative and vocative got to do with anything?"), or Hungarian with a background in English, French, and Latin ("Why does the plural marker for possessed objects differ from the "regular" plural marker? Are you Hungarians just out to f**k with me?"). I wonder how you'd fare with Hungarian since its case endings don't get recycled as in German (or even Slavonic languages), but there are more such endings to deal with as the cases consider nuances that you probably couldn't imagine being expressible with a case ending. You'd probably wonder why not use an adposition or just a longer construction (hint: such adpositions or constructions don't necessarily exist in Hungarian no matter what foreigners think). For example, when translating "from" in Hungarian, you have three sets of case endings to draw on: -ról/-ről (from the surface of something/somebody - "delative"), -ból/-ből (from the interior of something/somebody - "elative"), and -tól/-től (from the vicinity of something or vicinity/possession of somebody - "ablative"). German could translate these and "from" with the dative prepositions aus and von.

I won't say the same for German (yet), but as a rather experienced teacher of French, I, like most colleagues, believe that many features of French exist solely to make the life of the learner miserable. Many things could be simplified but for powerful forces, starting with the Académie française, who believe that things should never change.

I think that this is a very odd (and faintly puerile) sentiment to hold, especially from professionals who should know better. It even sounds a bit like tinfoil-hat conspiracy crap with its reference to some governing body/cabal pulling the strings. It's things like this that make me convinced that any language teacher worth his/her salt (even two-bit TESL candidates, some of whom I had the pleasure of meeting when undergoing teacher training) must have taken an introductory course or two in historical linguistics and/or history of the language to be taught as part of their professional training. A lot of irregularities in a living language's standard variant arise from standardization occurring when something in the language was changing, and that change didn't affect the whole language be it the sound inventory or word-stock. It could also have been that the standardization drew heavily (or only) on elements that were used by part of the speech community. In the case of modern standard German it draws a lot on dialects from the 17th and 18th century which were used in what are now certain parts of central Germany, particularly older forms of Upper Saxon (i.e. spoken around Leipzig and Dresden). What seems regular to some in the speech community is not necessarily so regular to others. In any case, the needs of the foreign learner are never considered, and how could/should they be?

I suspect that you and your co-workers wouldn't regard certain features of the language as mere traps for learners upheld by the clique at the Académie française if you knew something about the evolution of French, especially the ancestral forms as attested in Old French. See here for some examples such as how it is that I had to learn to say je tiens and nous tenons instead of *je tenis and *nous tenissons respectively. I'd be damned if you blame the Académie for perpetuating learners' misery by having to teach this or some other oddity in the modern language when there are clues about the variation once you do some old-fashioned research with reference works.

You can gain insight using the same approach with German (and anyway, there's no comparable regulatory body for German like the Académie française for you to blame). The syncretism of -en as seen today in most instances of "weak" declension for adjectives wasn't so in Old High German. Suffixes for "weak" declension in adjectives were -en, -in, -on, and -un among others, depending on case, gender and number. Based on your preceding posts, however, I'm afraid that you'd grumble about that set-up as well, perhaps wondering why the declension was (should have been?) subdivided into that many endings to align with case, gender and number.

[Cainntear]

I've just skimmed through this thread (it's pretty long) and I don't think what I'm adding has been said yet... apologies if it has.

I don't have a lot of experience with cases (Scottish Gaelic's case system is fairly simplified, and it's the only case-marked language I've ever studied to conversational fluency) but it looks to me as though case systems are less arbitrary than choice of prepositions, and in that respect case marking should be easier.
Perhaps the problem is all about non-fluent speech.

I. Am. Thinking. About. Learners. Who. Speak. Like. This.

If you're producing language that way, you think of the semantic relationship of noun and verb independently of the noun, and express that relationship in an individual word -- the preposition.
But declining a noun means thinking of two semantic entities simultaneously -- the relationship (case) and the noun root.

It's more work, and a different kind of thinking. It's also the right kind of thinking, in that it's precisely what you need to do to learn to speak fluently!

Me personally, I try from the very beginning to pronounce prepositions as "clitics" (short explanation: a clitic is a word that is very nearly a prefix or suffix, e.g. in and the in English. "the car" = "theCAR", "in the car" = "intheCAR") and to do that I have to think of both relationship and root simultaneously.

I would imagine that most people here would be the same, and anyone who has ever learned a case-marked language as an adult would do this for non-case-marked languages without even thinking about it.

[Cainntear]

Also, one of the concepts that makes case semantics easier to understand is that of "agency and affectedness".

Every player in a sentence has a certainly level of agency (in terms of making choices, participating actively etc) and affectedness (how much they are changed by the verb event).

Typically the subject has highest agency -- consider "I shot him" -- but certain relationships give other nouns agency -- "I went there with John" vs "I took John with me".

If "I go to France", I am the agent (I choose to go) and I am also the most affected (I've changed location, whereas France isn't particularly fussed about whether I'm there or not). But if "I send you to France", France still isn't affected very much, and I still have agency, but you are now very heavily affected with no implied agency.

Many of the uses of cases can be categorised roughly by these. An accusative case typically implies high affectedness, and a dative less so. Consider that the Latin term dative was originally intended to refer to a recipient of a gift: I gave the dog to Peter. Peter (dative) is mildly affected (he has a new dog) but the dog (accusative) is highly affected (his whole life is now different). This "to Peter" is dative, but "to France" is something else (don't know the terminology, sorry). Where a language translates the different meanings of "to" with different cases (or even just different prepositions), the difference in affectedness becomes explicit.

I personally credit a lot of my success in languages (which there hasn't been of late -- I've gotten lazy) is down to having been trained to analyse language this way. I've got some kind of semi-conscious awareness of agency and affectedness, which I think helps me start to pull together things into categories.

[Iversen]

I have several points to comment on. Firstly,

(...)for me, it made more sense to learn the "Местный падеж" rather than to learn the "second locative" or whatever its name is in the grammar books. Same thing for the "Разделительный падеж", or "second genitive" that works more or less like a french partitive.
It's easier to remember the "exceptions" this way, in fact, as the logic of the system and the historical evolution of the language appear more clearly, imho.

This is not far from the thought I expressed above: when we draw the line between regular tables/rules and exceptions it is ultimately a decision WE draw, based on simple convenience, not some god-given Platonic entity we discover. Languages do have regularities (that's an empirical fact), but they also have chaos, and we would never be able to eradicate that chaos just by building ever more complex rule systems. When we get down to rules affecting very few words or subject to flimsy decisions taken on the fly then we should stop the search for regularities and just accept that we have an exception. And if we can explain that exception by referring to extinct cases then it is just fine (and can serve as a memory hook), but sometimes we can't, and then we can just describe how a certain word or expression is used. And if the profit we get from accepting a few exceptions is that we can dispense with a whole case or a whole declension pattern in our system, then it may be worth the price. And if a distinction doesn't have any operational consequences then it should be abolished, the sooner the better.

Secondly,

I, like most colleagues, believe that many features of French exist solely to make the life of the learner miserable. Many things could be simplified but for powerful forces, starting with the Académie française, who believe that things should never change.

Contrary to Chung I don't take this at face value, but rather as a somewhat sinister joke. But it is not totally without foundation. The French academy has not been able totally to stiffle developments in the written language - and not at all in the spoken language - and the academy is not the sole responsible for the current situation where there you find a serious gap between the 'cultivated' French writing language and ordinary spoken French, but it has definitely been a conservative force to be reckoned with. The English orthography has also lagged behind the pronunciation, and that's not the responsability of any one academy with superpowers - it just happened. But the gap in French includes morphology and syntax features to a degree you don't see in English, and you are entitled to look for reasons for this situation. The French academy was established by cardinal Richelieu in 1635 (under Louis XIII), and with very few exceptions (like replacing "oi" with "ai" in some endings) the orthography and much of the grammar has been virtually unchanged since then, whereas spoken French has been wheering freely off into space since the era of Louis Treize and his puppet master.

Btw: I would compare the French situation to the situation for dialect speakers who have to write in another dialect - like the Swiss Germans who write in Modern High German and not in their local dialect.

So what can cause developments in morphology - or in other terms: why do Germans and Russians and Serbians still use multiple cases? Why don't Dutchmen and Bulgarians need to do so (apart from certain pronouns)? And let's just summarily disregard the possible influence from institutions in society. Almost all the relevant distinctions occurred before the institutions were established. So ..

What exactly does gender grant a language?

The original reason for introducing gender MUST have been of a semantical nature, and it must have meet a psychological need rather than a linguistic one. But once invented all kinds of illogical uses crept in, and now gender is mainly a grammatical category with limited agreement with biological realities. If Finnish can do without gender marking (using other sources of biological-gender information where it is relevant) then other languages could too, but it is too late to change them.

And even having the distinctions - logical or not as they may be - spills over unto to the concord between subjects and adjectival subject predicatives which is obligatory in many languages. The concord leads by definition to redundant information and lays a burden on the language users, so by ordinary darwinian standards it would have been weeded out long ago - or never have survived in the first place when somebody tried to introduce it. And why don't all languages be alike in this respect? If cases and gender have a purpose why don't all languages then have them? If not, why do some have them? On the other hand, once grammatical distinctions are established the tend to live a life of their own, and then funny things can happen which defy simple utilitarian logic.

Point one: phonological developments don't happen with the purpose of provoking grammatical changes, but sometimes they do seem to cause them, and morphological changes may have syntactical consequences and inversely. For instance there is a certain logic in the fact that French needs to express subjects, if necessary by an unstressed pronoun, whereas Italian can dispense with dummy subjects because its phonology is such that you can hear the person and number of verbs. In this way French 'rescued' the information that was eroded away from the verb endings. But why was it important to retain it in the first place? I know I'm me, and if I'm speaking to you we both know that you are you - everything else is the third person, and then the only remaining question is how many third persons I intend to refer to. To be frank, this is a quite rudimentary information, but apparently of psychological importance for the speakers - otherwise French would still allow subjectless sentences.

Another question: why do adjectival subject predicatives accord with the subjects in many languages? Probably because adjectives in substantival phrases do so. Why do adjectives (articles) in substantival phrases then accord with the core substantive in such phrases? Well, probably for the same reason that sports teams, police corps and most professional orchestras have uniforms - to mark that they belong to a specific group. But marking this has a high price, which logically only could be defended if it prevented possible confusion. For me it is hard to see why adjectives should be inflected at all EXCEPT if used instead of substantives.

By the way: in Russian subject predicatives often are in the instrumental case, especially in sentences where the verbs isn't in the present tense. How did that come up? There must be some kind of thought behind this - i.e. some kind semantical of consideration, but I don't know the explanation (yet). However thinking of predicatives as something that under some circumstances do something to the subject can help me as a language learner to construct idiomatically correct sentences. We have to describe grammar in operational terms, but the pretty rules and patterns ultimately grow in a semantical swamp. And logic may apply ... or not.

[s_allard]

...

I won't say the same for German (yet), but as a rather experienced teacher of French, I, like most colleagues, believe that many features of French exist solely to make the life of the learner miserable. Many things could be simplified but for powerful forces, starting with the Académie française, who believe that things should never change.

I think that this is a very odd (and faintly puerile) sentiment to hold, especially from professionals who should know better. It even sounds a bit like tinfoil-hat conspiracy crap with its reference to some governing body/cabal pulling the strings. It's things like this that make me convinced that any language teacher worth his/her salt (even two-bit TESL candidates, some of whom I had the pleasure of meeting when undergoing teacher training) must have taken an introductory course or two in historical linguistics and/or history of the language to be taught as part of their professional training. A lot of irregularities in a living language's standard variant arise from standardization occurring when something in the language was changing, and that change didn't affect the whole language be it the sound inventory or word-stock. It could also have been that the standardization drew heavily (or only) on elements that were used by part of the speech community. In the case of modern standard German it draws a lot on dialects from the 17th and 18th century which were used in what are now certain parts of central Germany, particularly older forms of Upper Saxon (i.e. spoken around Leipzig and Dresden). What seems regular to some in the speech community is not necessarily so regular to others. In any case, the needs of the foreign learner are never considered, and how could/should they be?

I suspect that you and your co-workers wouldn't regard certain features of the language as mere traps for learners upheld by the clique at the Académie française if you knew something about the evolution of French, especially the ancestral forms as attested in Old French. See here for some examples such as how it is that I had to learn to say je tiens and nous tenons instead of *je tenis and *nous tenissons respectively. I'd be damned if you blame the Académie for perpetuating learners' misery by having to teach this or some other oddity in the modern language when there are clues about the variation once you do some old-fashioned research with reference works.
...

This attitude is exactly the source of the problem of unnecessary complexity of French. A bunch of antiquated or ancestral features are maintained in the language simply because they hark back to some bygone era and are maintained alive artificially by a conservative alliance of the various regulatory bodies, ministries of education, book publishers and dictionary makers.

The history of spelling reforms in French is the classic example of resistance to change. The fundamental question of course is 'Why bother changing the spelling at all?' One could argue that if people only knew the history of the language better they would understand why certain things are spelled a certain way. There is no need to modernize the spelling; people - especially teachers - need simply to study the history of French more and they wouldn't complain.

Fortunately, despite all this resistance there has been change, usually from users of the spoken language and when there is some political pressure. So, at the present moment we do have a rather timid spelling reform that dates back to 1990.

Currently there is a groundswell of change happening around the idea of making the language less sexist or gender-based. This is called le français inclusif. Now, what does the Académie française think about le français inclusif? Guess. Here is the official declaration:

DÉCLARATION de l’ACADÉMIE FRANÇAISE sur l'ÉCRITURE dite « INCLUSIVE »
adoptée à l’unanimité de ses membres dans la séance du jeudi 26 octobre 2017

Prenant acte de la diffusion d’une « écriture inclusive » qui prétend s’imposer comme norme, l’Académie française élève à l’unanimité une solennelle mise en garde. La multiplication des marques orthographiques et syntaxiques qu’elle induit aboutit à une langue désunie, disparate dans son expression, créant une confusion qui confine à l’illisibilité. On voit mal quel est l’objectif poursuivi et comment il pourrait surmonter les obstacles pratiques d’écriture, de lecture – visuelle ou à voix haute – et de prononciation. Cela alourdirait la tâche des pédagogues. Cela compliquerait plus encore celle des lecteurs.

Plus que toute autre institution, l’Académie française est sensible aux évolutions et aux innovations de la langue, puisqu’elle a pour mission de les codifier. En cette occasion, c’est moins en gardienne de la norme qu’en garante de l’avenir qu’elle lance un cri d’alarme : devant cette aberration « inclusive », la langue française se trouve désormais en péril mortel, ce dont notre nation est dès aujourd’hui comptable devant les générations futures.

Il est déjà difficile d’acquérir une langue, qu’en sera-t-il si l’usage y ajoute des formes secondes et altérées ? Comment les générations à venir pourront-elles grandir en intimité avec notre patrimoine écrit ? Quant aux promesses de la francophonie, elles seront anéanties si la langue française s’empêche elle-même par ce redoublement de complexité, au bénéfice d’autres langues qui en tireront profit pour prévaloir sur la planète.

For those of you who don't want to wade through the whole text, I'll draw your attention to the key sentence: ...devant cette aberration « inclusive », la langue française se trouve désormais en péril mortel... That's right, the Académie thinks that the French language is in mortal danger because of this trend towards inclusive writing.

Since this thread is about cases, I won't go into any examples from French but readers can find many books on the difficulties of French for native speakers. All these difficulties can be explained by historical developments going back centuries but today they have become oddities that make life difficult for learners both native and foreign.

Edit: various typos