Fair point. My point would be that English doesn’t really inflect words at all, but when it does, namely pronouns, it has both cases and genders.
For comparison, in German, cases don’t change nouns either (except some genitives - kinda like English, now that i think about it), they instead affect articles, and even then the nominative and accusative case are identical, except for masculine singular nouns, and first and second person pronouns. So, if n. and f. nouns dominate, you could make the case that German doesn’t have an acc. case, and then make a carveout for m. noun “outliers”. Except step into first and second person, and acc. pops back out, meaning it was always there, even for f. and n.
OK, I agree with the argument, but one can call that a rudiment - same as for Russian some people say it has not 6, but 7 cases. That is, a vocative case (which archaic Russian speech would have, Belorussian and Ukrainian have without doubt, but standard Russian does not formally). It’s used when calling someone by name, like “Вась, Петь, Миш, Маш”.
Fair point. My point would be that English doesn’t really inflect words at all, but when it does, namely pronouns, it has both cases and genders.
For comparison, in German, cases don’t change nouns either (except some genitives - kinda like English, now that i think about it), they instead affect articles, and even then the nominative and accusative case are identical, except for masculine singular nouns, and first and second person pronouns. So, if n. and f. nouns dominate, you could make the case that German doesn’t have an acc. case, and then make a carveout for m. noun “outliers”. Except step into first and second person, and acc. pops back out, meaning it was always there, even for f. and n.
OK, I agree with the argument, but one can call that a rudiment - same as for Russian some people say it has not 6, but 7 cases. That is, a vocative case (which archaic Russian speech would have, Belorussian and Ukrainian have without doubt, but standard Russian does not formally). It’s used when calling someone by name, like “Вась, Петь, Миш, Маш”.
Well, it’s never clear cut with languages
True.