2831: Cases (can) Avoid Prepositions Sep 20, 2024

Cases in linguistics refers to nominal declensions, or in other words affixes (usually) that indicate the syntactic function, like the subject, object, indirect object etc.. English functionally has two cases including the genitive [word + ‘s], Classical Latin famously has 5 cases to learn and one or two vestigial forms from others* , and Finnish has an eye-watering 15 cases. Many of these used to exist in other languages, like Latin, but were niche enough to be subsumed by another, usually in the somewhat catch-all ablative case + preposition**, while Finnish has a relatively weak system of prepositions. 

For instance, in English to signify X being inside of Y, one uses a preposition like “in Y”, “within Y” or “inside of Y” etc.. In Finnish, along with other Uralic and Baltic languages, mainly Estonian, Hungarian, Lithuanian and Latvian, use the illative case. This transforms, for instance, the Estonian:

Kapp (‘wardrobe’) into Kappi (“inside the wardrobe”) without using prepositions as many other languages would.

*Like the 2nd declension singular vocative case

**The locative case was subsumed in part by the accusative, and the vocative became part of the nominative case.