Declension - Sanskrit

Sanskrit

Sanskrit has eight cases: nominative, vocative, accusative, genitive, dative, ablative, locative and instrumental. Some count vocative not as a separate case, despite it having a distinctive ending in the singular, but consider it as a different use of the nominative.

Sanskrit grammatical case was analyzed extensively. The grammarian Pāṇini identified seven semantic roles or karaka, which are related to the eight grammatical cases, but not in a one-to-one way. The seven karaka are:

• agent (kartṛ, related to the nominative)
• patient (karman, related to the accusative)
• means (karaṇa, related to the instrumental)
• recipient (sampradāna, related to the dative)
• source (apādāna, related to the ablative)
• locus (adhikaraṇa, related to the locative)
• address (sambodhan, related to the vocative)

For example, consider the following sentence:

Here leaf is the agent, tree is the source, and ground is the locus, the corresponding declensions are reflected in the morphemes -am -at and -au respectively.