Re: What defines the case name?

Quoting Joe Hill <joe@...>:

> Just wondering, I've been reading up on georgian and it uses the dative
> as direct object,
In Georgian, the dative marks the semantic patient only in
the imperfect and present tenses.  In the aorist, the dative
marks what it normally marks in SAE languages (recipient,
goal, etc.)

> so what defines a certain case?
It's important to remember that the names we gives cases are
really little more than labels.  We could, if we were frivolous
enough, call the nominative "the banana case".  What matters is
that you correctly predict how the case works morphologically
and syntactically.  In the classical tradition, the case marked
"nominative" in most grammars refers to the case that marks the
subjects of both transitive and intransitive verbs, but not the
objects.  For Georgian, however, this paradigm only works for
the present and imperfect tenses.  In the aorist, the subject
of transitive verbs is marked with the "ergative" case, while
the direct object of these same verbs in the aorist takes the
"nominative".  This suffices to show that cases names have no
more inherent meaning than what has by tradition been attached
to them.

=====================================================================
Thomas Wier <trwier@...> <http://home.uchicago.edu/~trwier>

             "...koruphàs hetéras hetére:isi prosápto:n /
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