Ray:
> At 11:20 pm +0200 14/7/99, BP Jonsson wrote:
> >Sanskrit uses the instrumental for "through" in the spatial sense,
BTW, so
> >that seems in order.
The book made out of Bill Croft's PhD (I forget its title) has a nice
cognitive
explanation for why this makes sense. Basically force travels a linear
path from one participant to another, billiardswise, and since
instruments
are intermediate on that path they would be expected to occur in the
same case that expresses the locative notion of being intermediate
along a path.
> > "Perlative" somehow sounds strange even to a Latinist, somehow...
Ray?
>
> Certainly it sounds strange for the meaning which is being given to
it.
>
> But as 'perlatio', 'perlator' & 'perlatrix' are all attested
(admittedly
> rarely) in Classical Latin, "perlative" is a perfectly valid
formation.
>
> However, what has been overlooked is that as a prefix 'per-' conveys
the
> meaning of "through to the end", "thorough" ('thorough' & 'through'
were
> once the same word in English), i.e. it denotes _completion_ of an
action
> (cf. per-fect). The Latin verb - perfero, perferre, pertuli,
perlatum -
> means to convey or carry something/ someone through to their
destination.
>
> "perlative" should mean 'pertaining to conveyance through to its
> destination' (i.e. conveyance that actually gets there - like the
'Poney
> Express' IIRC :)
I would call this "allative", though I forget the term I used to know
for 'motion
towards', as opposed to 'motion to'. Quite possibly 'perlative' is a
modern
formation (I find neither perlat- nor perfer- in OED1). Does anyone have
Trask's
dictionary to hand? He tries to cite first usages, to a degree.
--And.