Thread:User talk:CodeCat/Finnish declension/reply (12)

"Why is the nominative-like form called an accusative as well?"

I know I'm walking on thin ice, but the thinking may depend on the fact that in case of personal pronouns (the only true accusative forms that everyone seems to agree on) the accusative is used as equivalent to both nominative and genitive accusatives. At a slave market one might say ostan orjan/ osta orja but if one uses hän instead of  orja, it becomes ostan hänet/ osta hänet. The grammatical case must be the same both if the object is a noun or if it is a pronoun - ergo, there's a nominative accusative form. In the end, the existence of nominative-accusative is at least partially a question of convention, but this is anyway the convention that is widely agreed upon.