Construct state & cases, was: Grammatical Summary of Kemata

On Fri, 14 Dec 2001 11:53:24 +0100, Christophe Grandsire
<christophe.grandsire@...> wrote:

>En réponse à Steg Belsky <draqonfayir@...>:
>>
>> From my first (now over) semester of Arabic, i got the impression that
>> its three cases were Nominative, Accusative, and Prepositional...
Interesting... for me, they were always Nom., Acc., Gen.

>Well, I learned Subject, Direct and Indirect, since the first case is
usually
>used as subject of verbs, the second as direct objects and the third as
noun
>complements and indirect objects. But IIRC the prepositions take also the
>indirect case, and a few particle the direct case.
I'd say, absolute majority of prepositions (both primary and denominal)
demand gen. (= your indirect, I assume). That is, prepositions resemble
nouns very much.

>Anyway, how can you name a case system where some sentence constructions
have a
>subject in the direct case and an object in the subject case? :))))
I don't unerstand the latter... do you mean fronted "objects"? Traditional
grammars group such sentences with nominal ones, which is odd from the
European perspective, but rather plausible for Arabic. Such "objects" are
better analyzed as subjects in a special type of sentences.

>  And what do you mean that the construct
>> states
>> of Arabic and Hebrew are nothing alike?
>>
>IIRC (I don't know much of Hebrew though), the construct state in Hebrew is
an
>important form of the noun, and between the construct state and the non-
>construct state there are quite a few differences (vowels are different).
In
>Arabic, the "construct" state is merely not putting the article, and still
>keeping the definite case endings (so no tanwin) because the noun is
already
>definite due to the presence of the noun complement.
You forget duals and the "regular" masculine plurals which undergo more
more profound changes.

OTOH the Hebrew construct states are merely a phonetic transfomation of
originally the same type of forms as in Arabic; BTW, they seem to be less
regularly opposed to absolute state than in Arabic, at least in masc. sg.


Basilius
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