Dear Gunnar, George and Dipa,

Dipa: modern English has evolved to the point the noun cases literally
do not exist, although we can still technically identify them. For
example,

John calls Peter.
Nominative: John
Accusative: Peter.

The reverse is true for "Peter calls John". We can say that in modern
English, nominative and accusative cases have the same declension, the
distinction can be made by the correct placement of the nouns with
reference to the verb.

A language like Pali allows the user greater flexibility, in poetry
and for emphasising certain words, the placement of nouns.

Other languages like Latin has seven noun cases, German has four.

You may like to look at the Pali Primer for easy examples.


metta,
Yong Peng.

--- In Pali@yahoogroups.com, Dipa wrote:

My knowledge of English grammar terms like accusative, nominative, etc
is very limited in fact almost nonexistent.