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Re: all possible cases ;-)

From:taliesin the storyteller <taliesin@...>
Date:Wednesday, October 17, 2001, 10:31
* jaspax@juno.com said on 2001-10-17 05:59:49 +0200
> > Does anybody know the largest number of cases occuring in a natural > > language? > > I've heard 30 for some Caucasion language (which is more than Nik's 20 > reported cases). I have no external way to verify that, though. > > To do this, you'll have to be selective, though--you can't hope to > indicate *everything* that could conceivably be a preposition without > including infinite affixes. For example, what do you do with the concept > "under the care of"? In some language, somewhere, that concept is > probably indicated with a morphologically simple preposition.
Well, I consider that particular example yet another english idiom, so all bets are of. What would a romance-lang do in this situation? AFMC, it would most likely be a stative, with rough translation: "to be under the care of someone". t., who picked up a book on the subject today