Re: Grammatical Summary of Kemata

En réponse à Steg Belsky <draqonfayir@...>:

>
> From my first (now over) semester of Arabic, i got the impression that
> its three cases were Nominative, Accusative, and Prepositional...
> that's
> an incorrect assessment?
Well, I learned Subject, Direct and Indirect, since the first case is usually
used as subject of verbs, the second as direct objects and the third as noun
complements and indirect objects. But IIRC the prepositions take also the
indirect case, and a few particle the direct case. So it's probably just a
problem of name.

Anyway, how can you name a case system where some sentence constructions have a
subject in the direct case and an object in the subject case? :))))

  And what do you mean that the construct
> states
> of Arabic and Hebrew are nothing alike?
>
IIRC (I don't know much of Hebrew though), the construct state in Hebrew is an
important form of the noun, and between the construct state and the non-
construct state there are quite a few differences (vowels are different). In
Arabic, the "construct" state is merely not putting the article, and still
keeping the definite case endings (so no tanwin) because the noun is already
definite due to the presence of the noun complement. The three case endings
must still be used (especially since there's normally no pause between the noun
and its complement, so the vowel endings are still pronounced). That's why I
have doubts about this form being really a "construct state". Not using the
article on a noun because it's already defined by the noun complement sounds
perfectly enough to me, rather than to invoke a "construct state".

Christophe.

http://rainbow.conlang.free.fr

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