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I find it very odd (actually, wrong and contradictory) that the absolutive case of ergative languages is referred here as a kind of oblique case. An oblique case is supposed to be a marked/secondary case, as opposed to the unmarked/primary/citation/direct case which corresponds to the "plain" form of a word. In accusative languages like English, the primary case is the nominative and the secondary/marked/oblique case is the accusative (a word in the nominative is said to be in its "plain" or unmarked form and this is the form used to cite the word; e.g. "I" and "who" are the plain forms while "me" and "whom" are the oblique forms); if there are other cases apart from those two, like the dative in Latin and German, these are also oblique cases. But in ergative languages (such as Basque), the primary/unmarked case is the absolutive, while the ergative is secondary and marked (e.g. in Basque the "plain", primary form of the first person singular pronoun is "ni", in the absolutive, while the ergative form "nik" is a clearly marked, secondary case just like other oblique cases such as the dative "niri" and the genitive "nire"). Uaxuctum 12:17, 16 Dec 2004 (UTC)
Yeah, so this article is really hard to read for someone who has a rudimentary understanding of linguistics.
Well i am ignoring all the comments exept the first one for this topic. The page is too hard to understand i agree. Most pages on wikipedia are accessible to most and start with basic understanding. I am not saying the more complex analysis of the oblique form in linguistics should not be included. But the first paragraph should be weitten in such a way that any person wondering what oblique form is can find out without having to read masses of text and referring to several or more other pages. PAGE OVERHAUL!! Wuku ( talk) 10:43, 23 December 2009 (UTC)
As I understand it, Bulgarian is not the only analytical slavic languages, the closely related Macedonian language being the other one (and don't get political about this, al you Bulgarians! :)) JAL, 2006-07-24
Should this article be merged with Object (grammar)? FilipeS 01:24, 11 December 2006 (UTC)
I don't really understand why the Bulgarian example is an oblique case, since there seems to be a distinction between dative and accusative. I think the object forms of pronouns in English and Dutch would be better examples. Ucucha 16:49, 18 September 2007 (UTC)
I am a speaker of two synthetic Slavic languages (Serbo-Croatian and Slovenian) and could not help noticing that these languages display the same grammatic construct: 'Baci mi loptu'/'Vrzi mi žogo' (SC/SLO for 'throw me the ball') 'Baci meni loptu'/'Vrzi meni žogo' (SC/SLO for 'throw the ball to me (not him))
so I'm not exactly sure as to what the analytic nature of the Bulgarian language has to do with the oblique case.
Marko — Preceding unsigned comment added by 87.163.87.246 ( talk) 22:18, 30 January 2012 (UTC)
Odd sentence fragment found tacked on the end of this section: "and this website is a good website." Flag for review. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 97.127.230.55 ( talk) 02:46, 30 April 2018 (UTC)
The article says that ˝me˝ is not used in the genitive case of possession, but in rural English it very often is ˝That's me tractor you's stealin'˝ 93.96.96.27 ( talk) 00:21, 21 July 2008 (UTC)
I'm afraid that the explanation of what the oblique case is, does not do much for those without profound knowledge of linguistics. Someone with a deep understanding of the subject matter should make an attempt at making things clearer. LaughingSkull ( talk) 00:44, 28 November 2009 (UTC)
The recently created Dative/Accusative is a content fork for this article. I'm sure there are languages with an acc/dat (objective?) case, but not in English, and the article was created to illustrate English (is the link from English object pronouns). — kwami ( talk) 19:37, 18 March 2012 (UTC)
The article created is not a content fork for this article. It is in fact written in opposition to the claim that English has lost its dative and accusative cases and somehow shifted to an oblique case. English does not have an oblique case and the argument that it does is very much counter to established and accepted linguistic descriptions of the language. Even within the oblique case article it is proposed that that case is used in languages in which there are only two cases, nominative and a single 'everything that's not nominative' case. Even under the mentions of English given herein, it is admitted that the language does not fit this description as it also has a genitive case.
The Dative/Accusative article does not propose there being a dative/accusative case nor of there being any tie to the oblique case. It does however, correctly note that it refers to a single set of identical forms used for both the dative and accusative cases in languages which have both dative case and accusative case but in which the morphological forms used for each case have merged into a single combined form (yet still representing either dative or accusative depending on the case in which it appears via syntax). Arguing that English now has an oblique case rather than a dative and an accusative case based on the pronouns for each being identical is no different than arguing that English has only a single case because if you look at nouns, John/book/shopping could all be subject, direct object, or indirect object all having the same form. So, along those lines, does that mean that we should drop nominative from the case lineup as well?
Don't merge. Drew.ward ( talk) 04:14, 22 March 2012 (UTC)
The term "oblique case" is sometimes used to refer to forms of pronouns like "me" in English but, in view of the differing terminology, we should explain the different meanings in more detail. There are a number of issues.
We should perhaps add (sourced) material here (or elsewhere) discussing the view that English does not have case, and the view that English has analytic case in addition to inflectional case (treating "to" and "of" as case markers for dative and genitive, respectively. -- Boson ( talk) 12:03, 22 March 2012 (UTC)
Since this article seems to be mainly about the English "objective case", and "oblique case" is - at best - ambiguous, I would suggest moving that content to Objective case (which currently redirects here). If any encyclopedic material should emerge on oblique cases as a class, that could be kept at "Oblique case", but, for the present, I would have this page redirect to the new Objective case. Hatnotes and terminological notes reflecting the above should, of course, be provided. I don't think there is an ideal solution, but I believe this would be a good compromise and supported by WP:COMMONNAME. -- Boson ( talk) 12:03, 22 March 2012 (UTC)
The intention was to have an article that explains what the oblique/objective case is, just as we have articles on other cases, so that if you come across a gloss of 'dative', 'ablative', 'oblique', etc, you'll be able to look up what this means. The complication of 'the X case' vs 'an X case' arises with other cases as well: there may be more than one locative etc. in a particular language, but that doesn't mean that we don't use the term 'locative' when there is only one (as in Latin).
Quotes: Sure. The following quotes are from various authors in Ekkedard König & Johan van der Auwera, eds. 1994. The Germanic Languages (Routledge).
Dutch has three cases in its PNs, with ik – mij – mijn corresponding to English I – me – my, so this is a parallel situation to English with its genitive.
As in English and Dutch, there are also possessive pronouns, as shown in Table 8.5, with the column headings,
These are all parallel to the English oblique/objective, and they illustrate why I don't care for the term 'objective': in "Who, me?" and "It's me"!, me is not an object, nor is it in "Me and Jim went to the store", which would be standard English if our teachers didn't keep telling us that me can't be a subject.
In Table 10.3, the column headings for the Danish pronouns are,
The possessive PNs aren't listed because they're in the next table.
Afrikaans also has possessive PNs, as in Table 15.6.
For Gothic they do speak of the various oblique cases, just as in Latin, as there are separate accusative and dative cases. 'Objective' is used in a couple articles as well, though not to the extent that 'oblique' is, so it seems to be author choice which to use. But this is the first time I remember seeing the term "non-oblique" for the nominative! — kwami ( talk) 17:42, 22 March 2012 (UTC)
Here are the instances of "objective":
(scare quotes in original)
Here the author uses "accusative" for the OBL/OBJ case, as in 'the boy in the picture is me'; "objective" is a semantic relation of i.a. the genitive.
The "common case" is the conflated NOM-ACC. That is, 'objective' is accusative, not oblique.
Here objective is parallel to subjective and possessive rather than to nominative and genitive, a pattern I've seen over and over. — kwami ( talk) 18:39, 22 March 2012 (UTC)
Oblique case refers to any case except the Nominative or Vocative (thus possessive and object cases are the oblique cases.) I have corrected the introduction. ( EnochBethany ( talk) 16:21, 3 October 2013 (UTC))
The concept of case is greatly confused and misunderstood. Case has commonly been confused with suffix use. But even suffixes in English are often neglected. For example, what case is the -ward case? North is a noun as in the sentence, "John walked to the North." "To" here supplies the case; prepositions indicate case just as suffixes do in inflected languages. The suffix -ward could have been used: "John walked northward." In high school, there was no vocative case in my English classes. But the particle O could have been called the case marker of the vocative case: "O John, come here." And O might have been called a preposition in this use. Compare, "To John I come." IMHO, there are many, many cases; most not named as such, but roughly equal in number to the variety in suffixes that indicate relation to the sentence plus prepostions, plus word-order markers. Probably picking some of them to call "oblique," is questionable and arbitrary.( EnochBethany ( talk) 16:27, 21 October 2013 (UTC))
This article is a mess. I am comfortable with the subject material as I am a researcher in area - but I cannot follow the main article. The discussion on the talk page is much clearer. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 128.250.86.130 ( talk) 02:43, 5 December 2014 (UTC)
What's casus generalis?
"oblique case" in Latin is "casus obliquus" (cf. Latin-German: Kasus obliquus, Obliquus, obliquer Kasus).
Google book search has these results for "casus generalis":
So: Accourding to this google book search results "casus generalis" should be a single case (i.e. there are no other cases) which is something different than "casus obliquus" (there is also the casus rectus or there are the casus recti). - EXplodit ( talk) 11:26, 3 July 2015 (UTC)
This is the
talk page for discussing improvements to the
Oblique case article. This is not a forum for general discussion of the article's subject. |
Article policies
|
Find sources: Google ( books · news · scholar · free images · WP refs) · FENS · JSTOR · TWL |
![]() | This article is rated C-class on Wikipedia's
content assessment scale. It is of interest to the following WikiProjects: | ||||||||||
|
I find it very odd (actually, wrong and contradictory) that the absolutive case of ergative languages is referred here as a kind of oblique case. An oblique case is supposed to be a marked/secondary case, as opposed to the unmarked/primary/citation/direct case which corresponds to the "plain" form of a word. In accusative languages like English, the primary case is the nominative and the secondary/marked/oblique case is the accusative (a word in the nominative is said to be in its "plain" or unmarked form and this is the form used to cite the word; e.g. "I" and "who" are the plain forms while "me" and "whom" are the oblique forms); if there are other cases apart from those two, like the dative in Latin and German, these are also oblique cases. But in ergative languages (such as Basque), the primary/unmarked case is the absolutive, while the ergative is secondary and marked (e.g. in Basque the "plain", primary form of the first person singular pronoun is "ni", in the absolutive, while the ergative form "nik" is a clearly marked, secondary case just like other oblique cases such as the dative "niri" and the genitive "nire"). Uaxuctum 12:17, 16 Dec 2004 (UTC)
Yeah, so this article is really hard to read for someone who has a rudimentary understanding of linguistics.
Well i am ignoring all the comments exept the first one for this topic. The page is too hard to understand i agree. Most pages on wikipedia are accessible to most and start with basic understanding. I am not saying the more complex analysis of the oblique form in linguistics should not be included. But the first paragraph should be weitten in such a way that any person wondering what oblique form is can find out without having to read masses of text and referring to several or more other pages. PAGE OVERHAUL!! Wuku ( talk) 10:43, 23 December 2009 (UTC)
As I understand it, Bulgarian is not the only analytical slavic languages, the closely related Macedonian language being the other one (and don't get political about this, al you Bulgarians! :)) JAL, 2006-07-24
Should this article be merged with Object (grammar)? FilipeS 01:24, 11 December 2006 (UTC)
I don't really understand why the Bulgarian example is an oblique case, since there seems to be a distinction between dative and accusative. I think the object forms of pronouns in English and Dutch would be better examples. Ucucha 16:49, 18 September 2007 (UTC)
I am a speaker of two synthetic Slavic languages (Serbo-Croatian and Slovenian) and could not help noticing that these languages display the same grammatic construct: 'Baci mi loptu'/'Vrzi mi žogo' (SC/SLO for 'throw me the ball') 'Baci meni loptu'/'Vrzi meni žogo' (SC/SLO for 'throw the ball to me (not him))
so I'm not exactly sure as to what the analytic nature of the Bulgarian language has to do with the oblique case.
Marko — Preceding unsigned comment added by 87.163.87.246 ( talk) 22:18, 30 January 2012 (UTC)
Odd sentence fragment found tacked on the end of this section: "and this website is a good website." Flag for review. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 97.127.230.55 ( talk) 02:46, 30 April 2018 (UTC)
The article says that ˝me˝ is not used in the genitive case of possession, but in rural English it very often is ˝That's me tractor you's stealin'˝ 93.96.96.27 ( talk) 00:21, 21 July 2008 (UTC)
I'm afraid that the explanation of what the oblique case is, does not do much for those without profound knowledge of linguistics. Someone with a deep understanding of the subject matter should make an attempt at making things clearer. LaughingSkull ( talk) 00:44, 28 November 2009 (UTC)
The recently created Dative/Accusative is a content fork for this article. I'm sure there are languages with an acc/dat (objective?) case, but not in English, and the article was created to illustrate English (is the link from English object pronouns). — kwami ( talk) 19:37, 18 March 2012 (UTC)
The article created is not a content fork for this article. It is in fact written in opposition to the claim that English has lost its dative and accusative cases and somehow shifted to an oblique case. English does not have an oblique case and the argument that it does is very much counter to established and accepted linguistic descriptions of the language. Even within the oblique case article it is proposed that that case is used in languages in which there are only two cases, nominative and a single 'everything that's not nominative' case. Even under the mentions of English given herein, it is admitted that the language does not fit this description as it also has a genitive case.
The Dative/Accusative article does not propose there being a dative/accusative case nor of there being any tie to the oblique case. It does however, correctly note that it refers to a single set of identical forms used for both the dative and accusative cases in languages which have both dative case and accusative case but in which the morphological forms used for each case have merged into a single combined form (yet still representing either dative or accusative depending on the case in which it appears via syntax). Arguing that English now has an oblique case rather than a dative and an accusative case based on the pronouns for each being identical is no different than arguing that English has only a single case because if you look at nouns, John/book/shopping could all be subject, direct object, or indirect object all having the same form. So, along those lines, does that mean that we should drop nominative from the case lineup as well?
Don't merge. Drew.ward ( talk) 04:14, 22 March 2012 (UTC)
The term "oblique case" is sometimes used to refer to forms of pronouns like "me" in English but, in view of the differing terminology, we should explain the different meanings in more detail. There are a number of issues.
We should perhaps add (sourced) material here (or elsewhere) discussing the view that English does not have case, and the view that English has analytic case in addition to inflectional case (treating "to" and "of" as case markers for dative and genitive, respectively. -- Boson ( talk) 12:03, 22 March 2012 (UTC)
Since this article seems to be mainly about the English "objective case", and "oblique case" is - at best - ambiguous, I would suggest moving that content to Objective case (which currently redirects here). If any encyclopedic material should emerge on oblique cases as a class, that could be kept at "Oblique case", but, for the present, I would have this page redirect to the new Objective case. Hatnotes and terminological notes reflecting the above should, of course, be provided. I don't think there is an ideal solution, but I believe this would be a good compromise and supported by WP:COMMONNAME. -- Boson ( talk) 12:03, 22 March 2012 (UTC)
The intention was to have an article that explains what the oblique/objective case is, just as we have articles on other cases, so that if you come across a gloss of 'dative', 'ablative', 'oblique', etc, you'll be able to look up what this means. The complication of 'the X case' vs 'an X case' arises with other cases as well: there may be more than one locative etc. in a particular language, but that doesn't mean that we don't use the term 'locative' when there is only one (as in Latin).
Quotes: Sure. The following quotes are from various authors in Ekkedard König & Johan van der Auwera, eds. 1994. The Germanic Languages (Routledge).
Dutch has three cases in its PNs, with ik – mij – mijn corresponding to English I – me – my, so this is a parallel situation to English with its genitive.
As in English and Dutch, there are also possessive pronouns, as shown in Table 8.5, with the column headings,
These are all parallel to the English oblique/objective, and they illustrate why I don't care for the term 'objective': in "Who, me?" and "It's me"!, me is not an object, nor is it in "Me and Jim went to the store", which would be standard English if our teachers didn't keep telling us that me can't be a subject.
In Table 10.3, the column headings for the Danish pronouns are,
The possessive PNs aren't listed because they're in the next table.
Afrikaans also has possessive PNs, as in Table 15.6.
For Gothic they do speak of the various oblique cases, just as in Latin, as there are separate accusative and dative cases. 'Objective' is used in a couple articles as well, though not to the extent that 'oblique' is, so it seems to be author choice which to use. But this is the first time I remember seeing the term "non-oblique" for the nominative! — kwami ( talk) 17:42, 22 March 2012 (UTC)
Here are the instances of "objective":
(scare quotes in original)
Here the author uses "accusative" for the OBL/OBJ case, as in 'the boy in the picture is me'; "objective" is a semantic relation of i.a. the genitive.
The "common case" is the conflated NOM-ACC. That is, 'objective' is accusative, not oblique.
Here objective is parallel to subjective and possessive rather than to nominative and genitive, a pattern I've seen over and over. — kwami ( talk) 18:39, 22 March 2012 (UTC)
Oblique case refers to any case except the Nominative or Vocative (thus possessive and object cases are the oblique cases.) I have corrected the introduction. ( EnochBethany ( talk) 16:21, 3 October 2013 (UTC))
The concept of case is greatly confused and misunderstood. Case has commonly been confused with suffix use. But even suffixes in English are often neglected. For example, what case is the -ward case? North is a noun as in the sentence, "John walked to the North." "To" here supplies the case; prepositions indicate case just as suffixes do in inflected languages. The suffix -ward could have been used: "John walked northward." In high school, there was no vocative case in my English classes. But the particle O could have been called the case marker of the vocative case: "O John, come here." And O might have been called a preposition in this use. Compare, "To John I come." IMHO, there are many, many cases; most not named as such, but roughly equal in number to the variety in suffixes that indicate relation to the sentence plus prepostions, plus word-order markers. Probably picking some of them to call "oblique," is questionable and arbitrary.( EnochBethany ( talk) 16:27, 21 October 2013 (UTC))
This article is a mess. I am comfortable with the subject material as I am a researcher in area - but I cannot follow the main article. The discussion on the talk page is much clearer. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 128.250.86.130 ( talk) 02:43, 5 December 2014 (UTC)
What's casus generalis?
"oblique case" in Latin is "casus obliquus" (cf. Latin-German: Kasus obliquus, Obliquus, obliquer Kasus).
Google book search has these results for "casus generalis":
So: Accourding to this google book search results "casus generalis" should be a single case (i.e. there are no other cases) which is something different than "casus obliquus" (there is also the casus rectus or there are the casus recti). - EXplodit ( talk) 11:26, 3 July 2015 (UTC)