Re: Case

At 10:17 09/07/99 -0400, you wrote:

        Yes, I'm a little late to answer that, but the mail server was down for
the weekend.

>My conlang used to have a really really elaborate case system, with
>probably about twenty five different cases.  Recently I decided to
>change this to just a few:
>nominative
>accusative
>dative
>genitive
>prepositional(?)-does anyone have a better name for that-its for use
>after prepositions, obviously
>
        That's a perfect term for it (it is used for Russian actually).

>I'm just curious, but those of you who do use case in your language, how
>many do you have?  Where does it go from being "cool" to just plain
>unworkable?
>
        Well, I don't find any limit to the "workable" in fact. In my languages,
the number of cases range from 1 (Notya and Reman, even if Reman has also a
kind of genitive, but its use is very narrowed) to 34 (Tj'a-ts'a~n). Moten
has 3 cases (nominative, accusative and genitive), and also use prefixes
for such things like cause, goal and origin (but they are not considered
cases as they are not infixes and are not used with verbs to make aspects).
Azak has 22 case suffixes, but as it is heavily agglutinating, one can also
consider them as postpositions or clitics. It has also strange cases like
two genitives (an ergative one and an absolutive one) and a contextual (for
the context of the action, which can be the manner, the subject of a forced
action by someone else, the place or time of action -a little like Japanese
'de' particle- or other things).

        And everything works fine! So you see, it's just a matter of personal taste!

>Nicole
>--
>"What's it going to be then, eh?"
>
>
                                                        Christophe Grandsire
                                                |Sela Jemufan Atlinan C.G.

"Reality is just another point of view."

homepage : http://www.bde.espci.fr/homepage/Christophe.Grandsire/index.html