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"Dative" comes from Latin cāsus datīvus ("case for giving"), a translation of Greek δοτικὴ πτῶσις, dotikē ptôsis ("inflection for giving"). [2] Dionysius Thrax in his Art of Grammar also refers to it as epistaltikḗ "for sending (a letter)", [3] from the verb epistéllō "send to", a word from the same root as epistle.
Latin is a heavily inflected language with largely free word order. Nouns are inflected for number and case; pronouns and adjectives (including participles) are inflected for number, case, and gender; and verbs are inflected for person, number, tense, aspect, voice, and mood.
Another is a dative singular ending of i (short i in Greek, long ī in Latin): rēg-ī "for a king"; χειρ-ί (cheir-í) "for, with the hand". This corresponds to an -e ending in Sanskrit, which might have been a contracted ai or lengthened i: bhagavat-e "for the blessed (one)"
The English word case used in this sense comes from the Latin casus, which is derived from the verb cadere, "to fall", from the Proto-Indo-European root ḱh₂d-. [8] The Latin word is a calque of the Greek πτῶσις, ptôsis, lit. "falling, fall". [9] The sense is that all other cases are considered to have "fallen" away from the nominative.
Term or phrase Literal translation Definition and use English pron accessio: something added Accession, i.e. mode of acquisition by creation in which labor and other goods are added to property in such a manner that the identity of the original property is not lost (vs. commixtio, specificatio)
This is a list of grammatical cases as they are used by various inflectional languages that have declension. This list will mark the case, when it is used, an example of it, and then finally what language(s) the case is used in.
Studying word order in Latin helps the reader to understand the author's meaning more clearly. For example, when a verb is placed at the beginning of a sentence, it sometimes indicates a sudden action: so complōsit Trimalchio manūs means not just "Trimalchio clapped his hands" but "Trimalchio suddenly clapped his hands".
Latin word order is relatively free. The verb may be found at the beginning, in the middle, or at the end of a sentence; an adjective may precede or follow its noun (vir bonus or bonus vir both mean 'a good man'); [5] and a genitive may precede or follow its noun ('the enemies' camp' can be both hostium castra and castra hostium; the latter is more common). [6]