Haha I decline your proposal not to get into that debate: the vocative is a grammatical case. Maybe not every noun can be put in the vocative, but it’s definitely one of the cases. Even the locative is a case, even though only a couple of nouns use it.

[–] lugal@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 2 months ago (1 children)

To be clear, in general the vocative is a case eg in Czech and other balto slavic languages (except eg standard Russian while colloquial Russian is developing a new unrelated one).

In Latin tho, it's more a relict. Other cases have relicts, too, still I wouldn't say Latin has the locative.

I would argue that being a relict is a spectrum. Technically, it is a case with many syncretism to nominative, since it is obligatory for those nouns. In the context of LAtiN hAs sOo0 ManY cAsES, it's not.

[–] Dewe@lemmy.world 3 points 2 months ago (1 children)

The Ohio State University seems to think these are both cases: https://classics.osu.edu/Undergraduate-Studies/Latin-Program/Grammar/Cases/latin-case .

[–] lugal@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 2 months ago

and there are vestiges of a seventh, the Locative.

I called it relicts but it's basically what I said. Maybe vestiges is the better word in English, in German we say "Relikte".