Re: Cases and Prepositions (amongst others)

Tom Wier wrote:

> To cite another example, Greek's 'dative'
> can be used to show possession, a feature which AFAIK does not exist in
> modern German.
Not in standard written formal German, no.  But it is quite common
colloquially: "das Haus ist mir".

> Sure.  But you need to be careful of relexing English prepositional
> uses into your language's case system.  The rules governing which
> preposition is required in English are often highly idiomatic.
One of the reasons why Lojban preposition-analogues are derived from
specific verbs, with a modifier to show which case of the verb is being
used:  from the 3-place predicate "finti" = "create" are derived three
preps meaning "created by X", "creating X", and "created with purpose X".

> There is
> no reason, as far as I can see, why most American English speakers
> say 'in line', while many New Yorkers say 'on line';  both are bending the
> general meaning of the preposition to a very great degree of abstraction.
Note the lexical difference between the commands "Get in line" (form a line) vs.
"Get on line" (add yourself to an existing line).  "Stand on line" is
fairly invariable, though.  After 20+ years in N.Y. I conform to this
distinction completely.

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