Re: Cases and Prepositions (amongst others)

At 21:58 06/06/00 -0400, you wrote:
>G'day y'all, I just have a few questions for you.
>
>In my conlang, tentatively called Ajuk, I've got seven cases:
>Nominative, Accusative, Dative, Genitive, Vocative, Ablative, and
>Instrumental. I've gotten to the point where I have to divvy up the
>preposition structure, and I realize that each in a language with case
>the nouns in a prepositional phrase have to go into a certain case,
>depending on the preposition and the meaning intended to be assigned to
>it.
>
Or you can also think of having a case like the "prepositional" of Russian.

>At first I was intending to make a system like in German, but that only
>covers four of my seven cases. The Vocative doesn't neccessarily need
>any, because it is fairly limited in it's use.
>
Well, in Latin, prepositions could be followed only by the accusative or
the ablative, while the very few postpositions asked for the genitive. This
makes only 2 (hardly 3) of the 6 cases of Latin. So if you use only three
of your cases with prepositions it would work quite well already.

>So what I want to know is, is there any particular system by which the
>prepositions are divided up in the case structure, or is it different
>from language to language, even in languages containing the same cases?
>
I cannot tell for sure, but I think it's quite different from language to
language. For instance, with the same preposition (like 'in'), Latin used
the accusative for motion towards and ablative for position. But English
associates motion with dative more than with accusative (you say "I give
the book To John" as well as "I go TO Paris"). So dative and accusative can
both have a meaning of motion towards. In the same way, genitive and
ablative can both mean motion from, depending on the language.

To give you conlang examples, in Moten (which has onbly three cases:
nominative, accusative and genitive), nominative is associated with
location, accusative with motion towards and genitive with motion from. The
same preposition (more exactly a prefix) is used with all three cases to
mean 'at', 'to' and 'from'. In A'stou (to talk about the conlang I'm mostly
sharing with the list right now :) ), which has four cases, the
accusative-genitive is associated with time while the
dative-ablative-locative is associated with space, and it's the
prepositions used which give the meaning of location or motion (in fact,
the same preposition that means location with D-A-L means moment in time
with A-G). This dichotomy between accusative: time and ablative (or
dative): space can be found also in Latin IIRC.

So I think you can make your system whatever you want. Just do what you
feel "right", there are examples of about everything around here :) .

>Another thing, I've got pronouns that mean things like "for that
>reason", "at some time", "in this manner", and such, and I need to
>decide what case they would go in. This kind of ties into the
>preposition structure, for example a word meaning "at some time" would
>go in the same case as nouns in a prepositional phrase with a
>preposition meaning "at". Again, is there any system to this throughout
>several languages or do I just have to make my own?
>
I understand what you mean, because I happen to have also pronouns like
that in Moten. I have 'e': this place, 'a': that place and 'o': yon place
for space and 'et': this moment, 'at': that moment and 'ot': yon moment for
time. They take the same cases as I explained earlier to mean 'at this
moment', 'here', 'from there', etc... Many adverbs of Latin seem to come
from declined forms of pronouns too. I think it would be quite natural to
tie those 'pronouns' cases to the ones used with the prepositions.

                                                Christophe Grandsire
                                                |Sela Jemufan Atlinan C.G.

"Reality is just another point of view."

homepage : http://rainbow.conlang.org
(ou : http://www.bde.espci.fr/homepages/Christophe.Grandsire/index.html)