Old High German is an inflected language, and as such its nouns, pronouns, and adjectives must be declined in order to serve a grammatical function. A set of declined forms of the same word pattern is called a declension. There are five grammatical cases in Old High German. Grammatical cases A complete declension consists of five grammatical cases. Description of cases The nominative case, which is used to express the subject of a statement. It is also used with copulative verbs. The accusative case, which expresses the direct object of a verb. In English, except for a small number of words which display a distinct accusative case (e.g., who > whom, I > me, he > him), the accusative and nominative cases are identical. The genitive case, which expresses possession, measurement, or source. In English, the genitive case is represented analytically by the preposition of or by the enclitic "–'s", which itself developed from the genitive case. This –'s is related to the common Gothic "-s". The dative case, which expresses the recipient of an action, the indirect object of a verb. In English, the prepositions to, from and for most commonly denote this case analytically. The instrumental case, which is used to express the object, with which its activity is performed. It roughly corresponds to the prepositions with and by. Order of cases English grammars of Old High German often present the cases in the order NOM-ACC-GEN-DAT-INST. Strong vocalic declensions Note: Declensions are named according to their form in Proto-Germanic. Often intervening sound changes render the once transparent stem endings opaque, and the name may no longer make much sense synchronically. The -a declension This declension has as counterparts the second declension (us/um) of Latin and the omicron declension (os/on) of Greek. It contains masculine and neuter nouns. Examples of masculine nouns declined like tag "day": bërg "mountain", wëg "way", geist "spirit", himil "heaven", tiufal "devil", kuning "king". Notes: Disyllabic nouns ending in -al, -ar and -an, with long stems, sometimes drop the -a- before an ending beginning with a vowel, e.g. masculine singular ackar "acre, field", genitive singular ackres. Note that in these cases, the -a- is an epenthetic vowel that was not originally present (compare Gothic akrs < Proto-Germanic *akraz), and so the "deletion" of this vowel is really the preservation of the original form. Proper names in the -a declension take a pronominal accusative ending -an,