I’ve been flying through my Romani course and haven’t spent a lot of time going over cases, so I thought I’d go through them one-by-one here as much for me as for the rest of y’all. Please excuse the poor graphic design, I’ll put a little explanation for each one as well because over-explaining is my hobby.
All of the sentences and all of the information came from Learn Romani/Das-dúma Rromanes by Ronald Lee and pertain to the North American Kalderash dialect.
This is basically the simplest form of the noun. It uses regular adjective declensions (-o/-i/-e) and regular articles (o/e/le).
This is a really important case to know if you want to learn literally any other case because all the rest (besides the vocative) are based off of it. These rules are very much simplified but the more complicated version is hell and really not that much different anyways. Just as a note, when you see “oblique stem” later on, that just means the noun in accusative form. Also, as a side note, this case is not used for inanimate objects (like a chair), only for animate ones (like a horse).
This case basically just marks the indirect object, although if you change the order of the sentence and have the direct object come first after the verb, you’ll need to use the prepositional case (although this sounds suspiciously like it might have been adopted from English since the course I’m using is for North American Kalderash, so I’m curious if the structure is used in dialects from non English-speaking areas).
This case signifies location or motion to a place (mostly just “to”). As noted above, it can also be used like English in sentences such as “He gives the money to the boy.”
This case is fairly self-explanatory.
This case can be used for “with” and also for “by” when describing the instrument used to carry something out (“made by hand”) or for transportation (“came by boat”). The “s” is added to the oblique stem unless it already ends with it (as many singular masculine nouns do).
This case is a bit more complicated, but it’s not that bad. All the extra clutter is basically because nouns declined in the genitive basically function as adjectives and therefore need to agree with the noun that follows them in number and gender. For example, you would say “grâstesko” or “múrro” before a singular masculine noun, “grastêski” or “múrri” before a singular feminine noun, and “grastêske” or “múrre” before a plural noun (only for the nominative; the oblique adjective endings are a bit different but don’t worry about those).
If you listen to any song in Romani they will either say “Dévla” or “Rrômále, shavále,” all of which are inflected in the vocative form. Basically, if you’re talking to someone and you call them out by name, O My Dear Reader, you must use this case. It’s not based on the oblique stem, it’s entirely different. Also it doesn’t have versions for the personal pronouns because the person you’re addressing is already second person.
Well, that was hell super fun! Hopefully I’ll have more grammar for next week, we’ll see what happens.
