Re: Analogy: cases & prepositions; verbal inflection & adverbs

>From: Matthew Kehrt <matrix14@...>
>Hmmm...
>Today, I finally figured out how to make my prepositions work.  I made
>them all into cases.  Every preposition except for "of", which is an
>exception, has its own case.  This actually allows me to pull my lang,
>Eviendad"il, into a much more cohesive whole by establishing an overall
>pattern for my cases.
No case for "of"?  What do you do for genitive?

Ed Heil wrote:

>Essentially a "case" is nothing but a preposition fused to the verb
>and charged with grammatical necessity.  Grammaticized, as they say.
>Made into a small and fixed class and made necessary.  But
>semantically, cases tend to do similar work to
>prepositions/postpositions.  Indeed, our beloved PIE case-endings are
>almost certainly the grammaticized remnants of fused postpositions.
I read that too.  In fact, many IE-ists (and Nostratists) believe that
Indo-European went through an ergative state, reflected possibly in
Anatolian (Hittite et al).  Though I'm not absolutely sure about Nostratic
(the theory *is* backed up with some convincing evidence and has been
proposed by more than a few linguists and the theory is almost a century
old), I do believe in a Kartvelian-IE-Uralic connection *at least*.  (They
do have similar case endings and pronouns; I outta post a comparison of
Georgian, Finnish and Hungarian with varius IE languages just for grins...)

In primitive IE, as with Uralic, Altaic, Dravidian and Kartvelian, case
endings are all suffixal bound morphemes, but Nostratic recreates unbound
postpositions which become prepositions in Afro-Asiatic.  How Sanskrit has
eight cases, Hungarian has seventeen, and Georgan has seven, just came from
natural evolution from the prototype.

I outta make an *attempt* at a reconstructed Nostratic (or perhaps
Proto-Language?) case reconstruction, which would probably result in a large
number of simple suffixes and a single declension most likely, since Turkic
languages have the same case endings for singular and plural (the latter
adds the -ler-/-lar- plural marker before the case marker).

Somehow Ugric got two sets of case endings for singular and plural, and both
Uralic and Altaic developed vowel harmony (which creates multiple
declensions *in a way*).  Indo-European, however, split nouns according to
animate-inanimate noun class, as Dravidian did.  Then IE emerged with
masculine and feminine subclasses for animates, like Afro-Asiatic did for
all nouns.  Mixed with the case endings (and I'm not really sure there were
originally the eight cases of Sanskrit; it could've been more in fact), the
three genders became the five declensions of Latin (which originally had
seven cases!), and some number of declensions of Sanskrit; I wish I knew how
many...

(whatever happened to Skrintha anyway?)

DaW.
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