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.

2474: Hebrew's (Potential) Accusative Case Sep 20, 2021

Biblical Hebrew uses the suffix -ה (a-) to indicate motion-towards: a common feature of the accusative case, which otherwise is used to mark direct objects. Hebrew already has a direct object marker for definite nouns—‎‎את (es)—but no way to mark indefinite nouns. Historically however, it would seem that this suffix -ה (a-) would have, whether or not the noun was definite. This accusative form was mostly lost with this one lingering use and a few potential vestigial forms in vocabulary, but some have even suggested that on top of that an early variety of Hebrew had a nominative */-u/ ending for subjects, and genitive */-i/ ending for possessives, but there is less evidence here.