Re: Basque bizarreries (was: Conland Digest etc.)

En réponse à Christophe Grandsire :

Ouch! Eudora crashed on me before I could finish writing this post, and 
when I restarted it sent the unfinished one without even asking me!! It's 
really time I find a better mail client! :(((

So here comes the end of what I wanted to write :(( .


>>As to the many cases in Basque, especially the
>>locative ones, it's not really different from Finnish
>>from ex. Anyway, from a conceptual point of view, I
>>don't think there is any difference between using,
>>either a case, either a preposition, in sentences
>>like:
>>* I'm going to the city*, *I'm coming from the city*,
>>vs:
>>*I'm going city-ADL*, *I'm coming city-ABL*.
Indeed. Actually, it can be argued that in Spoken French "prepositions" are 
really case prefixes (they have no own stress, aren't spoken as separate 
words - even stressless ones -, change form and provoke sound changes when 
they are added to words, etc...). And in many languages with lots of cases 
affixes, those can usually be traced back to ancient adpositions. The whole 
thing is cyclical: nouns use case affixes, those affixess fall because of 
sound changes, forcing the speakers to find other strategies to mark noun 
function (can be noun phrases like Japanese does, or verbal phrases as you 
find in languages with serial verbs), those strategies get slowly eroded 
through use and sound changes, leading to adpositions, those adpositions 
themselves get included in the noun because of other sound changes, 
creating new case endings, and the cycle begins again.

Christophe Grandsire.

http://rainbow.conlang.free.fr

You need a straight mind to invent a twisted conlang.