Re: Accusative or not accusative; that is the question
| From: | Lars Finsen <lars.finsen@...> |
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| Date: | Monday, September 25, 2006, 15:50 |
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Den 25. sep. 2006 kl. 05.19 skrev Santiago Matías Feldman:
>
> The question is, I was thinking that the accusative
> needed to be marked too, as any other case, but then I
> realized that if that was the case, the language would
> lose quite a bit of elegance as regards the way it
> should sound.
What options for marking it have you been thinking of?
> Summing up, the two options are these:
>
> 1st:
>
> NOM la om
> ACC omul
> GEN la omus
> DAT la om-???
> ADL? la omat (to the man)
> LOC la oman
> ??? la omaš (from the man)
> ??? la omsun (without the man)
Perhaps you need two different cases for those two latter senses, but
I'd like to mention that you could combine them into one without
risking much ambiguity, letting the context decide the meaning. For
example with ablative as the choice, you can express 'I went without
the man' as "went-I the man-abl" and 'I went from the man' as "went-I
the man-gen house(or wherever he's at)-abl." This is done in some
natlangs. Statements such as 'I got it from the man' also would be
unambiguous because few context would make any sense of 'I got it
without the man'. I have experimented a bit with this in my Urianian,
an IE language with a postpositional trend due to substrate
influence. Just thought I'd like to mention it.
> etc (under construction!) etc
>
> 2nd:
>
> NOM omul
> ACC la om
> GEN la omus
> DAT la om-???
> ADL? la omat
> LOC la oman
> ??? la omaš
> ??? la omsïn
> etc
>
> Which one would you choose?
Yes, like others I think the latter looks best. Natlangs often go for
neatness if they are given a clear choice, because it works best for
the memory. Still there are many cases where they take the odd way
out as well. So it's not necessary the option that looks best which
would be the choice of your Laturslavs. Perhaps you should ask them?
LEF
...P.S.: I had 262 unread messages when I came back from my trip, so
it will take some time before I get to reply to everything. Have to
get some work done as well...
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