Cases

Motivation

In Czech we have this thing called free syntax. What it means is that the words in the sentence are mostly free with their position and they can be anywhere. The syntax is not entirely free as some sources tend to suggest the most complex rule of czech wordordering is discused in the chapter second position.

To demonstrate the free syntax feature imagine a situation where Tomáš and Jan played a match of tennis against each other and Tomáš won. Now in english there's exactly one correct word ordering of conveying the information and that is:

• Tomáš defeated Jan.

Now imagine English had the same free syntax feature, then all of the following sentences would be correct:

• Defeated Tomáš Jan.
• Defeated Jan Tomáš.
• Jan defeated Tomáš.
• Jan Tomáš defeated.
• Tomáš Jan defeated.

These sentences would not only be correct, but they would also all convey the same information. That it was Tomáš who won and Jan who was defeated.

In English this would be impossible since English relies on the word-ordering as a source of information, the winner comes first, then comes the verb "to defeat" and the comes the person who actually was defeated.

Since speakers of Czech cannot really rely on the word-ordering they need a different way of conveying the information about who is the winner and who is the defeated one. The solution to this are (suprise suprise, name of the chapter) - cases.

The "Tomáš defeated Jan" sentence would be:

• Tomáš porazil Jana. (you can shuffle the words freely)

And the other option "Jan defeated Tomáš" would be:

• Jan porazil Tomáše. (again in any wordordering you can come up with)

That leaves us with the definition of what declension is. Declension is changing the form of a word (noun, pronoun or adjective) based on it's function in the sentence. The options a word can choose from are called cases and in Czech there are seven of them for both singular and plural, summing up into 14 potentialy different (very often some of the case for a certain word are the same) variants of every noun, adjective and most of pronouns.

Note that english language also had cases but got rid of them in the process. None the less we can still see some artifacts of the declension in the English language mostly in pronouns. Take a look at examples:

• I defeated you.
• You defeated me. (in this case, the free syntax would work even for english!)
• He defeated her.
• She defeated him.
• Who is he?
• To whom do you want to give it?

Our seven mighty heroes

In czech school system the case have a strict ordering and are being refered to by their position in that ordering. Therefore we have first case (první pád), second case (druhý pád), third case (třetí pád) etc. However for teaching forigners latin labels of the cases are being prefered. In these materials whenever we will list the cases, we will list them in the ordering given in the czech school system, but we will be refering to them by their latin names or their abbreviations (marked in bold).

Bare in mind that the cases might exist in you language as well and might even have the same name, yet every case has huge variety of usages so a one to one correspondence of two cases amongst two different language is basically impossible.

Time to present our 7 heroes:

1. Nominative (NOM)
2. Genitive (GEN)
3. Dative (DAT)
4. Accusative (ACC)
5. Vocative (VOC)
6. Locative (LOC)
7. Instrumental (INS)

The usages

We can classify every usage of a case into two categories. The case is used either with a preposition or without it. When it's used without a presposition it has it's "natural" meaning, this meaning is often what gave the case it's name. When it's used with a preposition the meaning comes mostly from the preposition. This condemns us to learn the proper case to every preposition, which is mostly arbitrary system. Note that some prepositions (about half of them) can be combined with more than one case resulting in a diffrent meaning every time.

The table below summarizes the "natural" meaning of every case and the prepositions that are associated with it. Some of the "natural" meanings of the cases may be approximated by english prepositions. These prepositions don't really have an equivivalent in Czech. You can think about it like this, when you would use this preposition in english you would use that case in Czech and no preposition. The preposition is kinda baked into the "natural" meaning of that case. These prepositions are in the natural meaning of the cell in bold.

Below we will briefly discuss each case

Nominative