Re: OT: sorta OT: cases: please help...

Nope, because there is no case here, if you define "nominative" as being
"the case of the doer" - nothing's being done. In "the student writes"
student is nominative (he's writing).
Mike
----- Original Message -----
From: "Kala Tunu" <kalatunu@...>
To: <CONLANG@...>
Sent: Thursday, December 06, 2001 7:11 AM
Subject: Re: sorta OT: cases: please help...


> nicole dobrowolski <fuzzybluemonkeys@...> wrote:
> Subject: Re: sorta OT: cases: please help...
>
> here are some of the examples my polish professor gave us:
> 'i write with a pen'... ok that works 'pen' is in the
> instrumental
> case, but the next example is: 'i am a student'... huh?
> what?
> wouldn't both 'i' and 'student' be nominative?
>
> ...nicole
>
> "The strength of a civilization is not measured by its
> ability to
> fight wars, but rather by its ability to prevent
> them."--Gene Roddenberry
> """"""""""""""""""""""""
> depends whether you talk about "core cases/roles" or about
> "grammatical cases".
> with core roles, "student" is an equative. with grammatical
> cases, the same equative is expressed with either a
> nominative (german), an accusative (latin) or whatever.
> grammatical cases depend on the lang. for instance in
> correct french genitive is made with the genitive
> preposition "de"
> ("la voiture de mon frère") but in "bad french" it's made
> with
> the dative "à" ("la voiture à mon frère").
> in estonian, the accusative is usually expressed with a
> partitive genitive.
>
> Mathias
> www.geocities.com/kalatunu/index.htm