Vocative for nominative

[E Wayles Browne]

B, C, and S all have it. It is an optional feature of the style of
epic folk singing, e.g.
Vino pije Kraljevic'u Marko
"Marko the prince drinks wine"

The meter of this kind of epic song requires 10 syllables in
a line, broken down into a first part with 4 syllables:
Vino pije
and a second part with 6:
Kraljevic'u Marko

If we had "prince" in the nominative:
Kraljevic' Marko
there would be only 5 syllables and it wouldn't be a
good second-part-of-the-line.

These songs and their meter (it's called epski deseterac
"epic 10-syllable-meter") have been studied by Milman
Parry and his disciple Albert B. Lord, both of whom taught
at Harvard. Their collections of recordings are in
Widener Library; see
http://www.chs.harvard.edu/mpc/
for information.

I haven't heard about Vocative-instead-of-Nominative
in other Slavic languages; it's probably nonexistent in
Modern Slovenian, since there is no separate Vocative
case. There is a Vocative in Polish and to some extent
in Belarusian. Perhaps experts on these languages can
tell whether it is ever used for the Nominative.
Yours,
-- 
Wayles Browne, Assoc. Prof. of Linguistics
Department of Linguistics
Morrill Hall 220, Cornell University
Ithaca, New York 14853, U.S.A.

tel. 607-255-0712 (o), 607-273-3009 (h)
fax 607-255-2044 (write FOR W. BROWNE)
e-mail ewb2 at cornell.edu

> Dear SEELANGers,
>
> Does anyone know of any language (esp. in Slavic langauges), in which
> vocative
> is used for nominative? I am excluding the case when a default/unmarked
> nominative is used for vocative, i.e., John! Ivan!.
>
> Among Slavic, I have heard/read about BCS (am I right in order?),
> Slovenian,
> Belarussian (,and possibly Polish, to my vague memory) have this kind of
> morphological substitution...
>
> Many thanks in advance,
>
> Joon
>

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