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Typically, languages have nominative case nouns converting into genitive case. It has been found, however, that the Kansai dialect of Japanese will in rare cases allow accusative case to convert to genitive, if specific conditions are met in the clause in which the conversion appears. This is referred to as "Accusative-Genitive conversion." [7]
For neuter nouns, the nominative, vocative, and accusative cases are identical. The nominative, vocative, and accusative plural almost always ends in -a. (Both of these features are inherited from Proto-Indo-European, and so no actual syncretism is known to have happened in the historical sense, since these cases of these nouns are not known to have ever been different in the first place.)
In neuter nouns, the vocative and accusative are always the same as the nominative; the genitive, dative, and ablative are the same as the masculine. Most 2nd declension neuter nouns end in -um but vīrus "poison" and vulgus "crowd" end in -us .
There are five important cases for Latin nouns: nominative, genitive, dative, accusative, and ablative. Since the vocative case usually takes the same form as the nominative, it is seldom spelt out in grammar books. [dubious – discuss] Yet another case, the locative, is limited to a small number of words.
This is, however, only a general tendency. Many forms of Central German, such as Colognian and Luxembourgish, have a dative case but lack a genitive. In Irish nouns, the nominative and accusative have fallen together, whereas the dative–locative has remained separate in some paradigms; Irish also has genitive and vocative cases. In many ...
Latin word order is relatively free. The verb may be found at the beginning, in the middle, or at the end of a sentence; an adjective may precede or follow its noun (vir bonus or bonus vir both mean 'a good man'); [5] and a genitive may precede or follow its noun ('the enemies' camp' can be both hostium castra and castra hostium; the latter is more common). [6]
A few Greek nouns in -os, mostly geographical, belong to the second declension, and sometimes have an accusative in -on such as Dēlos, Acc. Dēlon (but Dēlum in prose). In the genitive singular, names in -ēs, parisyllabic, take -ī as well as -is. Some feminine nouns in -ô have the genitive in -ūs.
In Irish nouns, the nominative and accusative have fallen together, while the dative case has remained separate in some paradigms; Irish also has a genitive and vocative case. In Punjabi, the accusative, genitive, and dative have merged to an oblique case, but the language still retains vocative, locative, and ablative cases.