Not the most inspiring title for a blog post, I know.

Yesterday I was beginning to explain grammatical case to some new students, and it’s the first time many of them have dealt with this concept at all, and my teaching method with them so far hasn’t really involved any explicit grammar instruction. But I thought that they needed some orientation to understand what was going on in the language that I was throwing at them. So we took a moment to discuss the idea of case, and here’s a bit of how I explain it. I introduced them to the Greek terms πτῶσις, εὐθεῖα, and αἰτιατική:

Basically, πτῶσις means that the endings of words tell you what jobs those words are doing in a sentence, and how they relate to each other. In English, that job is mostly done by word order. Word order tells you what words are doing what jobs. In Greek, the endings of words are telling you this information, and so word order doesn’t have to do that job, it can go and do other jobs.

And so far, we’ve mostly been using the εὐθεῖα and the αἰτιατική a bit. Each case is like a job, and so when you need a word to do a certain thing in a sentence, it needs to turn up in the right uniform.

The εὐθεῖα is the ‘straight’ case; it wears a button-up shirt and behaves itself. One of the main tasks for its job is being the subject of a sentence.

[Asked about what the accusative ‘means’]

Don’t try and think about what a πτῶσις ‘means’ in the abstract. It is possible to do that, to some extent. But it’s better, in my opinion, to think of each case as a collection of mostly related job-functions. So, one of the αἰτιατική’s jobs is to work with πρός to indicate motion towards. If that’s the job you’ve got to do, you call out the αἰτιατική. If you need a word to be the direct object of a verb, again you often call out the αἰτιατική. In that sense, the αἰτιατική names a uniform and a collection of functions that go with that job.

~~

I think this isn’t a bad route to go down, but perhaps I’ll have second-thoughts about it later. I’m trying to get away from over-abstracting cases, and teach them as a bundle of uses, but give a good metaphor that explains those bundles so that they have enough of a conceptual grasp to get on with meeting and encountering cases and their uses in our conversations.