Archaic Dutch Declension - Usage of The Dutch Case System

Usage of The Dutch Case System

Since the late 17th century, in nouns, only the uninflected form (morphologically equal to the nominative) was still used, with a limited adjectival or possessive form of the genitive also still being productive. In Standard Dutch, unless they are proper names, clauses in which complements are brought to the head are considered archaic. Thus "Jans auto" (John's car), where the complement as head is a proper name is productive and in common usage. But a clause such as "des dages eind" (the day's end), where the complement is not a proper name and hence requires gender, case and number agreement is considered ungrammatical unless one is invoking an extreme archaism. Technically speaking the dative case is still required after the preposition "te" (to). However this preposition itself has become unproductive, and only results in dative constructions where it is being used with fixed expressions, such as "ten slotte" (finally), "te allen tijde". Nowadays, the preposition "te" is only used productively in relation to proper place names. For example, "Het Rijksmuseum te Amsterdam" (The national museum in Amsterdam). The accusative case was left for objects of transitive verbs and objects of all prepositions, bar "te". However, as distinctions between the grammatical cases were only weakly felt among speakers of Dutch, and as the feminine and neuter declensions were identical in the nominative and accusative, while the masculine declension was identical for the accusative and dative, endless confusion reigned.