Аннотация:Usually there are postulated 2 oblique cases in Gilaki and Mazandarani (the latter with 2 dialects - Shamerzadi and Velatru): Accusative-Dative and Genitive. In this work, the case system in Mazandaranian and Gilaki is revised and other grammatical categories (congruence and head/dependent marking) are taken into consideration. Persian-like (typical for south-western Iranian languages) and Mazandaranian and Gilaki’s ezāfe marking are brought into one system. On the one hand, the Genitive case marker is applied to the noun. It seems to be normal for a case: Mohsən-ə bərar (Gil.) ‘Mohsen’s brother’ ~ barādar-e Mohsen (Per.); Hosayn-e ketāb (Maz.) ‘Hussein’s book’ ~ ketāb-e Hoseyn (Per.).
On the other hand, it is applied to the adjectives: pil-ə xāne (Gil.) ‘big house’ ~ xāne-ye bozorg (Per.); xār-e ketāb (Maz.) ‘good book’ ~ ketāb-e xub (Per.);
to the numerals: šiš yek-e in sere (Maz.) ‘one sixth of the house’ ~ šeš yek-e in xāne (Per.);
and rather long NPs attā qešang-o tamiz-e kijā (Maz.) ‘a clean and beautiful girl’ ~ yek doxtar-e tamiz-o qašang (Per.).
The latter 3 are abnormal for a case marker, but usual for a reverse ezāfe construction. Therefore, there is no Genitive case in Gilaki and Mazandarani, but a grammatical category that can be called congruence.
There is a constraint related to the case: the case marker (ending) must be within the word boundaries (i.e. must create a synthetic word form). The so-called Accusative-Dative marker -re/-a is out of the word boundaries and does not meet this demand. It can be seen in the Persian borrowings:
Hato ki juloxānə məsjəd-ə šāh-a farəsə… (Gil.) ‘When he came to the foreside of the mosque…'
In the last example, the postposition -a refers to the word juloxānə ‘foreside’ and is separated from it by two words.
The marker -re/-a is omitted when the direct object is indefinite:
Gol čindembe (Maz.) ‘I pick a flower’; Men hamišeg vene berār jem naxod o bākele o marji xarimbe (Gil.) ‘I always buy peas, beans and lentil from his brother’.
It is odd for a case marker, but common for the postposition -rā in Persian. Thus, there is no Accusative-Dative case in Gilaki and Mazandarani either and the whole case system degrades into Nominative.
Basically, other postpositions are not attached to the stem directly, they need an ezāfe marker for this (the ezāfe marker can be omitted, though). They can be counted as ezāfe postpositions like ezāfe prepositions in Persian:
mə xāxer-ə vesse (Maz.) ‘for my sister’; amə šahrhah-ə dələ (Maz.) ‘in our towns’.
Thus, we conclude that in Mazandaranian and Gilaki there is no case system at all. This conclusion can be spread to their closely related dialects Shamerzadi and Velatru.