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Message:: [QUOTE="Roman Collector, post: 3013737, member: 75937"]It's difficult for an anglophone to understand these concepts because we have only a very, very rudimentary case system in modern English (though old English was fully inflected, with three genders (m/f/n) and five cases: nominative, accusative, genitive, dative, and instrumental). In modern English we have a subjective case (for the subject of a sentence), an objective case (for objects of sentences, whether direct or indirect) and a possessive case (the inflectional ending is 's). With the exception of the possessive case, we see this only in our pronouns: Subjective: she, he, it, you, we, who, whoeverObjective: her, him, it, you, us, whom, whomeverPossessive: her(s), his, its (without an apostrophe), your(s), our(s), whose So, in the sentence, He gave her his wallet, he is the subject (the one doing the action), her is an indirect object (the one indirectly receiving the action of the verb), and his indicates possession. The direct object is wallet as it directly receives the action of the verb, gave. In Latin and Greek, he would be in the nominative, her would be in the dative, his would be in the genitive, and wallet would be in the accusative. Cases indicate syntactic relationships between words in sentences. Because English has lost almost all its inflectional endings (wallet is the same whether it's an object or a subject), English uses prepositions and word order to indicate these relationships. Inflected languages do not need prepositions or a specific word order to do so. The inflectional endings identify who did what to whom (who is subjective case and whom is objective case) and word order and prepositions are not required, but are sometimes used for clarity. Indo-European languages originally had eight cases to indicate various syntactic relationships: Nominative: the subject of a sentence. Accusative: the direct object of a sentence or object of a preposition indicating motion toward something. English has a couple of words with vestigial inflectional forms indicating motion toward: hither and thither, meaning to here and to there, respectively. Genitive: possession or a relationship between two objects not specified by another case, which is often indicated by the English preposition, of (as in freedom of choice). Dative: indirect object of a sentence, which is often indicated by the English preposition, to (He gave his wallet to her); this case is also used to indicate benefit (dative of advantage) and may be indicated by the English for (I've done everything for you; you've done nothing for me, to quote Rick Springfield's cover of the Sammy Hagar tune). Instrumental: indicates by what means the action of the verb occurs, which is often indicated by the English preposition, by (We went by car). Locative: indicates location where the action of the verb occurs; it needn't be a physical location, it can be a point in time. This is often indicated by the English prepositions in or at (in a house, at noon). Ablative: indicates motion away from a noun, which is often indicated by the English preposition from (She ran away from home). English has a couple of words with vestigial inflectional forms indicating ablation: hence and thence, meaning from here and from there, respectively. Vocative: indicates the person to whom one speaks. Context (and often a comma) is required to indicate this in English ("Physician, heal thyself" or "You're doing it all wrong, son"). Now, over time, certain cases became lumped together. In Greek, the ablative function was assumed by the genitive case (used for both of and from) and the instrumental and locative functions were assumed by the dative case (used for to, by, and in). In Latin, the ablative case assumed the instrumental and locative functions (used for from, by, and in). Hence, there are five cases in Greek and six cases in Latin: the nominative, genitive, dative, accusative and vocative in the case of Greek, and the nominative, genitive, dative, ablative, accusative and vocative in the case of Latin. Alright, so what does this have to do with coins? Well, inscriptions on coins demonstrate these inflectional endings. For example, coins may bear an image of Juno and bear different inflectional endings: [ATTACH=full]747872[/ATTACH]IVNO REGINA is nominative, the case used for the subject of a sentence and for simple titles. It's just plain "Juno the Queen." [ATTACH=full]747873[/ATTACH]IVNONI REGINAE is dative and means "for Juno the Queen." [ATTACH=full]747874[/ATTACH]IVNONEM is accusative; it's unclear why it is used here but probably indicates the "motion towards" aspect of that case: "to Juno." In all of Roman numismatics, IVNONEM appears only on coins of Julia Domna, even though Juno appears on many coins over a period of centuries. [ATTACH=full]747877[/ATTACH]The reverse inscription, ΝΙΚΑΙΕΩΝ, is genitive and indicates a possessive or ablative idea: "of the Nicaeans." [ATTACH=full]747878[/ATTACH]FAVSTINA AVG(usta) ANTONINI AVG(usti) PII. Here FAVSTINA AVG is in the nominative (a simple title, "Empress Faustina") but ANTONINI AVG PII is genitive, indicating possession, "(wife) of Emperor Antoninus Pius." See how it works?[/QUOTE]

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