Thread:User talk:CodeCat/Finnish declension/reply

From a historical perspective there certainly is a separate accusative case. In Proto-Uralic, the accusative had the ending -m, while the genitive had the ending -n. In the later history of Finnish, final -m became -n, and you can still see this in many words like, which really end in -m- but this becomes -n when there is no ending. This change, of course, ended up making the accusative and genitive look the same. But they were still separate cases, and it's only a coincidence that they look alike in modern Finnish. And of course, some pronouns really do have a separate accusative ending in -t, and in the plural of all words the nominative and accusative look the same while the genitive is different.

So really, I'm not sure if the conventional approach makes sense. It's confusing form and function. The form of the accusative has the ending -n in the singular (or sometimes -t). But as a function of indicating an object, sometimes the form of the nominative is used, sometimes the accusative, sometimes also the partitive, and occasionally even other cases. The table that I created considers only the form: the ending -n is the accusative form, while the form with no ending is the nominative form. Which form is used when is a part of the grammar of Finnish, and doesn't really belong in a declension table I think.

A nice way to compare this is to look at some verbs in Icelandic. Icelandic has four cases: nominative, accusative, genitive and dative. The dative is used for the indirect object, some prepositions, as well as for certain verbs. Most verbs take an object in the accusative case, but some take an object in the dative case, and this is very much like the situation in Finnish where you sometimes use the accusative form and sometimes the nominative. I don't think anyone would ever consider, based on this, that the dative case is really also the accusative case in Icelandic; that the accusative really has two different forms. Instead, grammars state that sometimes you use the accusative to indicate an object, and sometimes the dative.

So I kind of see it the same way for Finnish. Instead of saying that the accusative sometimes has the same form of the nominative, I say that after certain verb forms, the object appears in the nominative form instead of the accusative form. This is the more historically accurate way to say it, but it still makes sense for modern Finnish.