There are three grammatical cases in Yiddish: nominative, accusative and dative. The nominative case generally is used for the subject, the accusative for the direct object and the dative for an indirect object or object of a preposition. Nouns themselves are normally not inflected for case, and case is indicated by the inflection of a related definite article or adjective. In a few situations, case inflection of the noun is optional or obligatory, including certain kinship terms (טאַטע "tate" 'father', מאַמע "mame" 'mother') and the words ייִד "yid" 'Jew' and האַרץ "harts" 'heart'. In those cases, masculine nouns take the ending ן- "-n" in the accusative and dative singular, and feminine and neuter nouns take ן- "-n" only in the dative singular.