Re: Case

Nicole:

Since cases essentially do the same work as pre/post-positions --
i.e. they dictate what relationship the noun has to the rest of the
sentence -- this sounds pretty reasonable.

There is in fact a theory that Indo-European case-endings are nothing
more than postpositions that got permanently fused onto the words -- a
situation the exact opposite of what would be happening in your
language.


Ed Heil ------------------------------- edheil@postmark.net
"Facts are meaningless! You can use facts to prove anything
   that's even _remotely_ true!"           -- Homer Simpson

nicole wrote:

> OK, to respond to my own post, I may have come up with a solution to my
> problem, tell me if this sounds normal/possible.  (The problem was, that
> I liked have all those cases, but it just got to be a pain).  Would it
> sound possible for a language with a very extensive case system to have
> some but not all cases change into adpositions, which required a case
> all their own?  Say, for instance, all my local cases were to detach
> from the noun and become postpositions (of course, in this case, my
> prepositional case would be postpositional...but anyway), and when a
> noun was used with a postposition it required a postpositional case,
> which had zero ending?  Maybe I can explain that better...  All my other
> cases have suffixes that mark them.  If there was NO marking at all,
> then that would be postpositional case (because no suffix was left on
> the words after the local cases were detached) and all the postpositions
> that the language used would be derived from those original local
> cases.  And maybe that would be one dialect of the language, while the
> one with many cases would be a different dialect.  The dialect with
> cases might be literary, or more for the upper class, who are trying to
> retain the way the language was in olden times.  Does this sound
> reasonable?
> Sorry I explained it in such a roundabout way, but I couldn't help it.
>
> Nicole
>