What are the relative frequencies of cases in Latin?

Question

Latin has seven cases: nominative, accusative, genitive, dative, ablative, vocative, locative. What are their relative frequencies in classical Latin?

I suppose an answer would have to be based on analyzing an annotated corpus or something similar.

I have no other motivation for this than idle curiosity, although I suppose one could use this information to argue that one really should learn all the cases — at least the first five.

see fig. 12.1 and 12.4 https://global.oup.com/booksites/content/9780199283613/figures/ (Pinkster 2015) — Alex B., May 13 '20 at 15:17
and Pinkster 1990 http://perseus.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/philologic/getobject.pl?c.19:6:2:1.NewPerseusMonographs — Alex B., May 13 '20 at 15:28
@AlexB. Thanks! Those make a great addition to the current answer. I'd be happy to see an answer based on those. I may write something up myself, but it'll take a while before I can find a good moment. — Joonas Ilmavirta, May 14 '20 at 10:15

score 19 · Accepted Answer · edited Apr 21 '20 at 08:09

19

From the Perseus Database, the frequency of the cases is as follows:

Nouns (19630):

accusative 31.6%
ablative 25.8%
nominative 22.6%
genitive 13.6%
dative 4.6%
vocative 1.2%
locative 0.2%
unknown 0.4%

Adjectives (7497):

accusative 33.0%
nominative 31.6%
ablative 21.8%
genitive 8.6%
dative 4.2%
vocative 0.6%
locative 0.0%
unknown 0.0%

Pronouns (6289):

accusative 33.1%
nominative 32.0%
ablative 13.1%
dative 13.1%
genitive 8.5%
vocative 0.1%
unknown 0.1%

edited Apr 21 '20 at 08:09

jogloran

733
6
12

answered Apr 20 '20 at 18:15

Expedito Bipes

10,740
2
29
50

3

Thanks! That was very quick for such a thorough answer. ;) – Joonas Ilmavirta Apr 20 '20 at 18:15
I find the unknown to be generally high. I guess unknown should account the times of ambiguity? – d_e Apr 21 '20 at 06:50
3

@d_e Certain words in certain contexts are ambiguous as far as assigning the case with any certainty. This was done "semi-automatically" and revised as much as possible. You can find more information about the PerseusDL Treebank at Github. – Expedito Bipes Apr 21 '20 at 10:46
Thank you for this answer and the link to the database. Both are very helpful. – End Anti-Semitic Hate Apr 22 '20 at 14:57

What are the relative frequencies of cases in Latin?

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