Road maintenance manager affirms that painted penii do not hasten pothole remediation

boing
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De cromulentia verbi “enmagnare” non est disputandum.

Ah, case orders.

So…

  1. Case orders are arbitrary.
  2. Case orders are traditional.

As with all things that are both arbitrary and traditional, there are some corollaries:

  1. The traditional order is probably sub-optimal according to some criteria.
  2. Some people will come up with a marginally better system and create annoying incompatibility for dubious gains.
  3. People care. There’s probably some place in Tartarus (in Tartaro) reserved for those who disagree with the only proper case ordering: Nominative, Genitive, Dative, Accusative, Vocative, Ablative.
  4. Different national traditions evolve.

The NGDAVA order seems to be quite old and is what is used at Austrian schools for German (NGDA), Latin and Ancient Greek (NGDAV). I failed to quickly google the beginnings of the tradition of writing down grammars for the Latin language - does anyone know when the first declension table was written down?

The NVA… order seems to have started with some 19th century british grammar book which consciously rearranged the cases to put the similar forms next to each other for didactic purposes. Also, German as a foreign language is often taught with NADG order, because that’s the order of frequency and importance.
It will end up confusing those second-language speakers of German, though; many native speakers use “4. Fall” (fourth case) as a synonym for accusative.

And of course, there’s the question of what counts as a case.
The Latin vocative only has a different form in one declension class, and the locative is even rarer. Vocative still got a case number, the locative didn’t.
Teachers of ancient Greek in Austria stop counting at four - the vocative in Greek is about as common as the Latin one, but as Greek has no ablative, the vocative is in the final position and can be left out.

The people of Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia, and Montenegro seem to be very proud that their four “completely different” languages have seven cases, nominative, genitive, dative, accusative, vocative, locative, and instrumental. However, I have yet to find a single word for which the vocative form differs from the dative form.

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