Fouvry F (fouvry@essex.ac.uk)
Tue, 26 May 1998 11:25:25 +0100
] I ] also want to know the historical background of "obliqueness." Historical background: the terminology comes from the grammatical `theory' set up by the Stoa (Stoic philosophers) in Ancient Greece. If I recall correctly, they used a metaphor of a pencil standing on its tip, and then falling down. By doing so, it crosses a certain number of positions on its way down, and these are the different "casus" (cases; from cadere, (Lat.) to fall - or ptooseis (piptoo, (Gr.) to fall)). Obviously, the pencil had an oblique position while it was falling, hence the name. The least oblique position is upright, and that is the nominative. I don't remember the rest of the ordering for certain (probably: vocative, genitive, dative, accusative (, and finally ablative for Latin)). The next question is of course why they introduced the pencil metaphor. I think that remained hidden in the Stoic philosophy (of which much has disappeared). It may even be that the description I gave in the previous paragraph is really a conflation of two metaphors (certainly one of which was Stoic), but this is what survived and is---even today---still used. Obliqueness is an ordering of the cases on linguistic/grammatical grounds, which of course can be redefined by a linguistic theory. -- Frederik Fouvry PhD student Department of Language and Linguistics University of Essex fouvry@essex.ac.uk Wivenhoe Park http://clwww.essex.ac.uk/~fouvry/ Colchester ESSEX CO4 3SQ Tel. +44 1206 87 20 91 (direct) United Kingdom Fax +44 1206 87 21 98
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