The vocative case is the case used for a noun identifying the person (animal, object, etc.) being addressed and/or occasionally the determiners of that noun. A vocative expression is an expression of direct address, wherein the identity of the party being spoken to is set forth expressly within a sentence. For example, in the sentence, "I don't know, John," John is a vocative expression indicating the party who is being addressed.
Historically, the vocative case was an element of the Indo-European system of cases, and existed in Latin, Sanskrit, and Classical Greek. Although it has been lost by many modern Indo-European languages, some languages have retained the vocative case to this day. Examples are Modern Greek, Albanian, Baltic languages such as Lithuanian and Latvian, Slavic languages such as Polish, Czech, Croatian, Serbian, Ukrainian, Macedonian, Bulgarian, and the modern Celtic languages such as Scottish Gaelic and Irish. Among the Romance languages the vocative was preserved in Romanian: it is also visible sometimes, in languages such as Catalan or Portuguese which employ the personal article but drop it in front of vocative forms. In Extremaduran and Fala language, some post-tonical vowels open in vocative forms of nouns, but it is a new development which doesn't come from the Latin vocative case. It also occurs in some non-Indo-European languages, such as Georgian, Arabic, Chinese, and Korean.
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Modern English does not have a formal (morphological) vocative case. English commonly uses the nominative case for vocative expressions, but sets them off from the rest of the sentences with pauses as interjections (rendered in writing as commas).
Historically, or in poetic or rhetorical speech, the vocative role in English may also be shown by prefacing the noun or noun phrase with the English word "O". This is often seen in the King James Version of the Bible: for example, "O ye of little faith" (in Matthew 8:26).Another well-known example is the recurrent use of the vocative phrase, O (my) Best Beloved, by Rudyard Kipling in his Just So Stories. This use of O may be considered a form of clitic, and should not be confused with the interjection "Oh" (Chicago Manual of Style, 15th edition, section 5.197).
See also Apostrophe (figure of speech).
In Latin the form of the vocative case of a noun is the same as the nominative, except for singular second-declension nouns that have the endings -us or -ius in the nominative case. An example would be the famous line from Shakespeare, "Et tu, Brute?" (commonly translated as "And you, Brutus?"), where Brute is the vocative case, whilst Brutus would be the nominative case. When "-ius" nouns are put into the vocative, however, they lose this ending and replace it with a "ī". Therefore, "Julius" becomes "Julī" and "filius" becomes "fili". When Latin names in the vocative case are translated into English, the nominative case is commonly used (see above).
The first person possessive adjective Meus also has an irregular Vocative case form, "Mī". Adjectives of the 1st and 2nd declensions when agreeing with a masculine object use the endings of 2nd declension -us nouns: thus if a 1st/2nd adjective is agreeing with "amice" (Vocative of a masculine singular "friend"), then it will also have the irregular -e ending: "amice magne".
A simple first declension example would be: "Equum spectā, Anna." This means "Watch the horse, Anna." The name Anna can be placed in any part of the sentence, although it is unusual for a vocative to come between a preposition and the noun governed by a preposition. For instance, "O Tertius and Carolus, carry the wood to the tree" (Ad arborem, Terti et Carole, materias ferte.) Also, "Be careful, Publius, of the Dog" (Cave, Publi, canem") and "Watch, Anna, the horse." or "Anna, watch the horse." (Equum, Anna, specta.)
Take, for example, the word for "wolf":