Theiling Online    Sitemap    Conlang Mailing List HQ   

Re: Crazy Cases

From:Pablo David Flores <pablo-flores@...>
Date:Wednesday, April 23, 2003, 21:42
Joe <joe@...> writes:

> Has anyone ever thought of different types of locative, as seperate cases?
> Nomino-locative:|-t| > 'the man in the car ate a sandwich' > Accuso-locative|s|: > 'the man ate a sandwich that was in the car' > Verbal Locative |n|: > 'the man ate a sandwich in the car'
Besides word order and context, some languages have to resort to periphrasis, like English in your accuso-locative. In Spanish you either use a relative clause ("the man that was in the car") or change the preposition (I'd say the most common would be "de", as in "el hombre del auto..."). The usual bad translation (for movie subtitles) of the nomino-locative ("el hombre en el auto") is understandable, but sounds ungrammatical. Terbian solves this problem by inflecting the corresponding postposition. A postpositional phrase on its simplest form is a verbal complement always. If you want to make it a noun complement, you mark the postposition as a noun complement using the oblique case. So the postposition actually becomes a modifying noun (or an adjective, if you want to see it that way). Hólnë tagw Hransó aro líssimo danó ar... <verb phrase> (SO = singular oblique) hól-në tagw [ Hrans -ó ar-o [ líssim-o dan -ó ar ] ] ... ago-ADV AUG [ France-SO in-SO [ quiet -SO village-SO in ] ] ... "Long ago, [ in a quiet village [ (that was) in France ] ]..." OR "Long ago, in a quiet in-France village..." The first instance of |ar| "in" is inflected (|aro|, thus making it clear it modifies the following NP. The second instance is in the core case, so it's clear it modifies the verb. For those that followed the "Strange voices" thread: I also managed to get the pseudo-antipassive voice in there, using the locative phrase above as the Patient-Subject of the verb "to live", and marking the verb with a locative applicative. English was of course an inspiration: "In a village there lived...". --Pablo Flores http://www.angelfire.com/scifi2/nyh/index.html "The future is all around us, waiting, in moments of transition, to be born in moments of revelation. No one knows the shape of that future or where it will take us. We know only that it is always born in pain." -- G'Kar quoting G'Quon, in "Babylon 5"