What Do You Call the Form for Calling Someone? A Case of Its Own
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Many languages change the form of a name when addressing the person directly rather than talking about them. English lost the distinction and marks it with punctuation instead.
What the form does
Most grammatical cases mark how a noun relates to the rest of the sentence, showing whether it is the subject, the object, the possessor and so on. This one does something different, since a name used to address somebody has no grammatical relationship to the sentence at all and stands outside it. That is why it behaves oddly in every language that has it, frequently being the one form that differs from all the others, and why some grammarians argue it is not properly a case but a separate category entirely.
Where it survives
The distinction is alive across a good part of the world:
- •Latin, where it differs from other forms in only one class of nouns
- •Greek, both ancient and modern
- •Most Slavic languages, with Polish, Czech and Ukrainian using it constantly
- •Irish and Scottish Gaelic, which also change the start of the word
- •Romanian, alone among the major Romance languages
- •Sanskrit, Arabic, Georgian and many others
What English does instead
English had the distinction in its older form and lost it along with almost all its case marking, and it now conveys the same information by other means. Position does some of the work, since a name at the start or end of a sentence set off from the rest is understood as address. Intonation does more in speech. And punctuation carries it in writing, which is the whole reason the comma before a name matters and why its absence produces the well-known jokes about inviting people to eat their relatives. A small number of frozen forms survive from religious and poetic language, which is why certain older texts sound formal.
What happens to borrowed names
Languages that keep the form have to do something with names imported from languages that do not, and the results are revealing. Slavic languages generally apply their own endings to foreign names, so a visitor called by name in Polish or Czech hears a form of it that does not exist in their own language, which surprises people. Irish changes the beginning of the name as well as adding a marker before it, which transforms a familiar name considerably. Some languages leave borrowed names unchanged, treating them as indeclinable. Personal names are frequently the most conservative part of a case system and the last place the distinction survives.
The famous Latin example
The phrase attributed to Caesar as he was assassinated is the example every Latin student meets, and it illustrates the form precisely. The name in ordinary use ends in one way and the form used to address somebody directly ends in another, which is the change that gives the phrase its shape. The line itself is almost certainly not what was said, since the near-contemporary account reports Caesar saying nothing or speaking in Greek, and the Latin version comes from Shakespeare by way of earlier Elizabethan plays. It remains the most widely recognised instance of the form in any language.
The takeaway
A name used to address somebody stands outside the sentence entirely, which is why the form marking it behaves differently from every other case and why some argue it is not a case at all. Latin, Greek, the Slavic languages, Irish and many others keep it. English lost it and carries the same information through position, intonation and a comma, which is why that comma changes the meaning.