Re: Case

>
> >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?
Teonaht eschewed cases for the longest time, relying on word order, with
the
articles inflecting for case.  As that word order became more flexible,
I introduced case into a large substrata of non-Teonaht words
(Nenddeylyt
borrowings).  Nenddeylyt is a language I've never developed, but
apparently
it was heavily inflected.  Traces remain in the special case endings for
the N. borrowings (celnar, "snail" Nom.; celnarb, "snail" Acc/Dat.).
SVO
languages seem the ones most likely to lose their case endings and go
the
analytic route because you have a natural separator with the verb in the
middle.  But SOV and OSV languages would probably hang on to them when
juxtapositions can be confusing.  I find that some dialects of T. adopt
the N. endings for use in regular T. words.  But most of the time this
is unnecessary when the article can do the job of indicating case.

Sally
scaves@frontiernet.net
http://www.frontiernet.net/~scaves
http://www.frontiernet.net/~scaves/teonaht.html
http://www.frontiernet.net/~scaves/contents.html
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Tehwo tsema brondalaz obil hea nomai pendo.
"Summer like a white sword hangs over the land."
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Who unlocked the list, I wonder, while David was on vacation? :-)