The six Latin cases

Latin has six cases, and each one is a set of endings that tells you a noun's job. English puts the grammar in the word order; Latin puts it on the end of the word. Here is the whole system on one noun, dominus, the master.

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1. 1Puer
2. 2librum
3. 3puellae

Puer puellae librum dat: the boy gives the girl a book. The giver is nominative, the thing given accusative (-um), the person it goes to dative (-ae).

Three of those six jobs are done in English with a preposition: of (genitive), to or for (dative), by, with or from (ablative). Latin does them with an ending instead. Fewer small words, more information per word: that is the trade the whole language runs on.

Why the word order is free

English has almost no case endings left. They survive only on a few pronouns, which is why he sees him is fine and him sees he is not. Everywhere else English uses position, so the dog bit the man and the man bit the dog are different events.

Latin marks the job on the noun, so the words can move and the meaning stays:

The order changes the emphasis, not the facts: the word thrown to the front is the one being stressed. Swap the endings, though, and you swap the event:

• Dominum servus videt. - The slave sees the master.

The words stand in the same places. The -us moved to the slave, so the slave is now the one doing the seeing.

The six cases on one noun

Take deus, god:

Six slots, four distinct forms. The dative and ablative look alike in a great many Latin nouns, as deo gratias and cum deo show, and the sentence settles which is meant: here the preposition cum does it.

Which endings a noun uses for these six jobs depends on its family, or declension: terra makes terram, dominus makes dominum. That has its own chart: the five Latin declensions. The genitive and dative each do more than one job, and the ablative does a dozen; they have their own pages too: the genitive and dative and the uses of the ablative.