Re: Cases and Prepositions (amongst others)

At 7:31 pm -0400 19/6/00, Nik Taylor wrote:
>Raymond Brown wrote:
>> I was asked who said it was _originally_ an adverb; and
>> all the evidence I have as a poor amateur linguist is that it was
>> originally an adverb.
>
>Interesting.  I'm sure you're right, but I'd always assumed it was a
>pronoun of some sort in a locative case, with hither and hence being
>other cases.  If it was originally an adverb, how did the forms hither
>and hence originate?
Logical but not AFAIK usually so in IE langs.  The equivalents of 'hence' &
'hither' are classed as adverbs in Classical Greek & Latin.  There seem to
be much of a hodgepodge.  IIRC the here/there/where words in Greek are old
locatives, but the hence/thence/whence & hither/thither/whither words are
formed with adverbial suffixes.  The Latin forms are not cases ending
either.

Arguably, of course, locatives can be considered adverbial derivatives from
nouns, cf. in urbe ~ Romae (in the city ~ in Rome).  But even more to the
point, the IE langs did not develop the 'full set' of locative, allative,
ablative and inessive, adessive, abessive cases that we find in, e.g.
Finnish.  The locative AFAIK no barely hangs on in the more ancient forms
and tends to get absorbed in with other cases, e.g. dative in ancient Greek
& ablative in classical Latin.  And the ablative tended either to get
absorbed in with another case as, e.g. in Greek where it fell together with
the genitive, or to attract other cases to itself, e.g. the Latin ablative
is a conflation of PIE ablative + instrumental + locative.

And a separate allative was never developed, the accusative being used for
this to some extent (still so in Esperant :)    But the
hither/thither/whither words are differently formed.

I'm not so well versed on protoGermanic but AFAIK the corresponding
formations in the Germanic langs were not regular case forms of the
pronouns either.

>
>> an adverb which may
>> be used substantively or adjectively as well, of course, adverbially, in
>> English.
>
>Adverb seems to be a very hodgepodge category.  Manner, place, time,
>negation, all these are traditionally called adverbs, yet they seem to
>me to be quite distinct.  Place and time especially seem very distant
>>from manner.
Absolutely - I question the validity of the term; it seems to be a dumping
ground for anything that is sort of related to (pro)nouns & adjectives, but
don't fit those categories exactly.

Indeed, I don't think the traditional Gaeco-Latin terminology really fits
happily with an analytical language like modern English (or Chines),
especially where words have a distinct fondness for not staying in neat
categories.

>> Nik's question on 6th June, which began the "from here" thread, was:
>> "How can a preposition govern an adverb?"
>
>And the question has, indeed, been answered.
>
>> But can we categorically state that adpositions may not govern adverbs in
>> any natlang ever?
>
>Of course not.
We agree  :)

And I don't think we've ever been too far apart on this.  In langs like
English & Chinese it seems to me that things can quite often be analyzed in
more than one according to the norms of the Graeco-Roman grammarians of
2000 years ago.

Ray.

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A mind which thinks at its own expense
will always interfere with language.
                   [J.G. Hamann 1760]
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