Re: Adunaic case system

In a message dated 3/18/2005 11:21:08 PM Eastern Standard Time,
dedalvs@GMAIL.COM writes:

>If I undertand these very vague descriptions correctly, then, yes,
>there are precedents.  The "objective" simply sounds like the genitive,
>only Tolkien gave it a different name.
True, it covers part of the range of a genitive.  (Not all of it;  in the
material I quoted JRRT mentions that the "normal" form covers the possessive kind
of genitive.)

>As for the subjective, it doesn't sound like a case, but a copula.
>Quoting the two examples:
>_Ar-Pharazon kathuphazganun_ = 'King Ar-Pharazon the Conqueror'.
>Contrast _
>Ar-Pharazonun kathuphazgan_ = 'King Ar-Pharazon is (was) a Conqueror'.
>One is a noun phrase (the top one), which would need to be
>used in a sentence with a non "fully inflected verb".  The second
>is a sentence.  So, then, it's not a case, but a copular clitic.  In the
>second example, it simply means "is" or "was", and in the first
>example it's an auxiliary, and the verb would be in some sort
>of infinitival form--hence, the non "fully inflected".
One non-clitic-like aspect of the "subjective" is its form.  Although I
quoted an example in which Subjective is indicated with a final -un, in some other
words (not quoted in my earlier message) it is indicated by a vowel change
rather than an affix:

Gloss    Normal    Subjective
spring    khibil    khibe:l
ear         huzun    huzo:n

(colons, in place of macrons, for long vowels)

It would be interesting to know whether JRRT considered how the subjective
might have evolved: from a copula, from a pronoun, or from some other source.

>In other words, this is no more than a misuse of the word "case",
>and possibly a misunderstanding of the concept of "case".
I think it's fair to say that JRRT, who had studied Latin and other
languages, understood the concept of "case", and the fact that he put 'case' in
quotation marks in its first two occurrences in what I quoted suggests he was aware
that the Adunaic phenomena he discussed were not what was typically covered by
the term 'case.'

Doug