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

On Friday, December 7, 2001, at 02:44 , Christophe Grandsire wrote:

> En réponse à Yoon Ha Lee <yl112@...>:
>
>> What about the French "l'État, c'est moi," where "moi" (accusative?)
>> is
>> distinct from the more usual "je" (nominative?)?  Je ne me souviens
>> pas
>> bien les détails de la grammaire française; pouvons-vous m'expliquer
>> la
>> situation pour(?) votre langue, Christohpe?  [I don't remember details
>
> If "je" is indeed nominative (in fact it's a clitic, despite written as an
> independent word, it cannot appear far from a verb - and absolutely not
> without
> a verb - and especially not with preposition), its accusative/dative
> equivalent
> is "me", which has the same status as "je": clitic. The independent form
> "moi",
> like normal nouns and all pronouns besides the personal pronouns, doesn't
> mark
> case. And indeed, it can be used with prepositions, but also as subject
> ("moi,
> je viens. Et toi?") or as direct object ("moi, il m'embête" in which the
> use
> of "moi" is strangely reminiscent of the topic particle "wa" of Japanese
> :)) ).
> As you see, the subject and object clitics are still used, proving their
> status
> as clitics which are part of the conjugation system, rather than
> independent
> words.
Okay, that makes sense.  :-)  I guess (as you noted in your post a couple
days back) the appearance of French really *is* very deceiving (especially
to me, as I learned it some years back, before I had any real background
of linguistics).  Because "je" and "me" are *written* as if they're
separate words it was easy for me to fall into the fallacy of assuming
that they *were* independent words.  ObConlang: has anyone done a
French-based conlang that reflects clitic-ness and so on more "intuitively"
?

Yoon Ha Lee [requiescat@cityofveils.com]
http://pegasus.cityofveils.com

Procrastination...I'll deal with it sooner or later.