Re: Crazy Cases

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"