The Vocative Case in Ukrainian

[Misha Schutt]

Stephen Bobick writes:

>    Which is the "correct" position, or, why are there two orderings?  All
the
>other cases are in the same relative order with respect to one another:
>
>    i.e.  NGDAVIL  versus NGDAILV
>
>    Also note that the vocative-seventh ordering orders the first six cases
>the same as in Russian.  Could this ordering be a soviet-era russification?

The case ordering you present is the traditional one handed down from
Latin/Byzantine grammarians and isn't "correct" any more than alphabetical
order reflects anything other than tradition.  The Latin/Byzantine order
breaks down as soon as you get to cases Latin and Greek don't have, and the
vocative is kind of a stepchild in Latin and Greek grammar anyway.  (I
suspect it's particularly important to Ukrainians partially because it's
another thing that differs from Russian.)

The most useful case ordering for Russian is NAGLDI, which places cases
together that sometimes share the same form.  If you do this to Serbo-Croat,
you discover such useful things as the fact that the dative and locative
always have the same form (barring certain accentual distinctions which I
suspect are artificial)--so students are learning paradigms with one more
case than they actually need.

Therefore, my answer to you is to look at the paradigms and figure out what
the "correct" order is for the cases in the language you are concerned
with--perhaps the order in which children acquire them (which might even put
the vocative first...)

Misha Schutt
Burbank (Calif.) Public Library