13

Seeing so many similarities in grammatical structure between Sanskrit and Latin, why is it that Latin does not have an instrumental case as Sanskrit does?

Asteroides
  • 28,832
  • 1
  • 80
  • 144
Ken Graham
  • 688
  • 1
  • 7
  • 18
  • 2
    Sanskrit also has a dual (in addition to singular and plural) and a locative that Latin doesn't (really) have, and Greek doesn't even have an ablative. I would guess that it's just another example of syntaxes simplifying, and the meanings of more specialized cases got lumped together with other cases. – Mar Johnson Feb 24 '16 at 01:28
  • 1
    Side note: if you Google "PIE cases", you might not get what you expect. – Mar Johnson Feb 24 '16 at 01:29
  • 3
    @MarJohnson: Bookcases with lots of volumes by Pokorny, I presume? – Cerberus Feb 24 '16 at 01:35
  • 1
    @Cerberus Wouldn't that be fun? – Mar Johnson Feb 24 '16 at 01:37
  • @MarJohnson isn't there a locative species of the dative in classical latin which periodically declines slightly differently (e.g. in the word locus)? – virmaior Feb 24 '16 at 06:09
  • @virmaior Sure, and that's why I hedged with 'really', but at least in my (limited) experience, those few words are just considered historical oddities. – Mar Johnson Feb 24 '16 at 09:11

1 Answers1

14

I'm not sure there is more of a "why" to it than the fact that, in Latin, the ablative mostly absorbed the Proto-Indo-European instrumental's functions as the latter disappeared, just as the Greek dative did (which also happened to absorb some functions of the Proto-Indo-European ablative as it disappeared in Greek). Some other functions of the ablative were absorbed by the genitive in Greek. The Latin subjunctive also absorbed functions of the Proto-Indo-European optative, etc.

Cerberus
  • 19,914
  • 3
  • 57
  • 110