The parameter
Case is the marking a noun carries to show what it is doing in its clause: who acted, on what, to whom, where, by what means. Languages differ in whether the noun carries that information at all, and in how many distinctions the system draws. Where case is absent, it has to come from word order or from adpositions instead.
The parameter is a count, and the count is less informative than it looks. Six Turkish cases and six Russian cases do not do the same work: the Turkish suffixes are separable, stable in shape and single in function, while the Russian endings fuse case with number and gender across several declensions. Nor is the boundary between case and adposition sharp: the Finnish and Hungarian inventories are large largely because they grammaticalized relations other languages express with prepositions.
The useful question is not how many cases a language has but how much of the clause's structure the endings carry, because whatever they carry has to be carried by something else on the other side.
How languages vary
- Rich case system: eight or more distinctions, usually including spatial cases. Finnish, standardly counted at fifteen; Hungarian, counted at between seventeen and twenty-seven depending on the analysis; Estonian, Basque.
- Reduced case system: four to seven distinctions covering the core relations and some oblique ones. Russian, Polish, Czech, Greek, Turkish, and German with four.
- No case marking on nouns: relations carried by order and adpositions, with case surviving at most in the pronouns. English, French, Spanish, Italian, Dutch, Mandarin.
Iggesen's WALS chapter 49 reports, for a sample of 261 languages, 100 with no morphological case marking at all; the rest spread from two cases upward, with 37 in the six-to-seven band and 47 with eight or more. Where case exists it is overwhelmingly suffixal: Dryer's chapter 51 counts 452 languages with case suffixes against 38 with prefixes. European languages occupy the whole range.
Consequences for translation
Case and word order divide one job between them. Where endings identify the participants, order is free to mark what is given and what is new. Where endings are absent, order carries the grammar and can be spent on nothing else. Translating into a caseless language, the source order was pragmatic and the target order is structural, so preserving it produces either something ungrammatical or something that says the wrong thing about emphasis. That reconfiguration is a structure shift and is not negotiable.
The second consequence appears in every sentence rather than occasionally. A case ending is usually vaguer than the preposition that must replace it: the Finnish adessive covers location on a surface, the instrument used and the possessor in a possessive clause, and the Russian instrumental covers instrument, means, the agent of a passive and a complement. English has no equivalent breadth, so the translator picks on, with, by, through or as, and the pick is more specific than the source was. That specificity is added information: usually recoverable and therefore legitimate, but a decision rather than a transcription, to be made the same way throughout a document.
Three practical points. Ambiguity closes in one direction only: where a source leaves open whether something was done by a party or through a party, the target must choose, and in binding text that choice belongs in a note. Word counts move, since replacing endings with function words lengthens the target, so length ratios are no completeness check. And fronting is not an error: a reviser who sees a Russian or Polish object in first position should read it as information structure and ask what became of that prominence.
Examples
RU>EN
- Source: Он написал письмо карандашом.
- Target: He wrote the letter in pencil.
- Comment: The instrumental ending states only that the pencil was the means. English must choose between with a pencil and in pencil, and the two read differently. The case drew no such distinction, so either choice is more specific than the source.
FI>EN
- Source: Pöydällä on kirja.
- Target: There is a book on the table.
- Comment: The adessive ending does the work of an English preposition and the existential construction that of a dummy subject. Six English words answer three Finnish ones, and on is narrower than the case, which would cover at equally well.
DE>EN
- Source: Den Vertrag hat der Kunde bereits unterschrieben.
- Target: The customer has already signed the contract.
- Comment: German accusative marking lets the object stand first without ambiguity, which makes it the topic. English cannot do this, since the same sequence would make the contract the subject. The topical position is lost unless rebuilt with a passive or a cleft, which is a separate decision from the obligatory reordering.
References
- Iggesen, O. A. (2013). "Number of Cases." In Dryer, M. S. & Haspelmath, M. (eds.), The World Atlas of Language Structures Online, Ch. 49. Leipzig: Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology.
- Dryer, M. S. (2013). "Position of Case Affixes." WALS Online, Ch. 51.
- Blake, B. J. (2001). Case, 2nd edition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
- Comrie, B. (1989). Language Universals and Linguistic Typology, 2nd edition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, Ch. 6.
- Karlsson, F. (2018). Finnish: A Comprehensive Grammar. London: Routledge.