Re: Crazy Cases

On Wednesday 23 April 2003 4:07 pm, you wrote:
> On Wed, Apr 23, 2003 at 03:21:25PM +0100, Joe wrote:
> > Has anyone ever thought of different types of locative, as seperate
> > cases?
>
> [snip]
>
> Interesting idea. I suppose you *could* encode different prepositions into
> a locative case morpheme... so that sitting in a car is different from
> being inside a house, for example. Or you could be on a mountain, or in
> it; both could be a locative ("where is he at?" "he's at the mountain").
>
[snip]

Thank you both for such a wonderful idea, which Gevey has obviously been
begging for, but which had never occured to me before you mentioned it.

The normal Gevey approach towards a sentence like "the boy next to the tree
ate the banana" is to use a relative clause:

The boy ate the banana - Rapte fosate yuu dhij
The boy stood next to the tree - Rapte polate basyuu rhab

The boy by [stood next to] the tree ate the banana -
   Rapte zhek polate basyuu rhab ok fosate yuu dhij

Which isn't too bad. But ...

Gevey also makes great use of coordinating conjunctions (and, but, or, plus a
lot of others) which it uses to string together lists of objects into phrases
which can then collectively act as the subject or direct object of a verb.
Tow of these conjunctions are "daet" (as part of) and "pout" (apart from),
which are clearly locative in their application. So it seems obvious (to me)
that these two conjunctions in particular should have the ability to suffix
to locative prepositions, the combined word then used as a coordinating
conjunction to link together objects within a phrase.

So, "the boy by the tree ate the banana" (rapte zhek polate basyuu rhab ok
fosate yuu dhij) could also be rendered as

   Rapte bazdaet rhabuu fosate yuu dhij

The boy under the table ... - Rapte suuzdaed blomuu fosate yuu dhij
The boy across the street ... - Rapte mavdaet kliyhietuu fosate yuu dhij
The boy in the market ... - Rapte izdaet nuhgzuu fosate yuu dhij
The boy on the bridge ... - Rapte zhuuzdaed vulmuu fosate yuu dhij

A wonderful idea. Thank you both again for the inspiration!

Rik