Re: Cases and Prepositions (amongst others)

DOUGLAS KOLLER wrote:
>
> From: "Christophe Grandsire"
>
> > >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.
>
> This is the strategy Géarthnuns uses. While I believe Russian still uses
> other cases like the accusative to govern certain prepositions, Géarthnuns
> took the idea of a prepositional case and ran with it whole hog (except that
> it's a postpositional case). *All* nouns in Géarthnuns followed by a
> postposition take the postpositional case -- if I had to individually assign
> and remember the case for postpositions like "on behalf of", "in conjunction
> with", "at the behest of", and "from among", I think I should go quite
> insane. I think there's a trade-off for this simplicity, though. While
> colloquial Géarthnuns is fairly kick-back about "to"-"at"-"from"
> distinctions, particularly when context is reasonably clear, if you want to
> get precise, you have to trot out the steamer trunk of (often unrelated)
> Géarthnuns postpositions to express "out from under", "across (a 2-D
> space)", "across (a 3-D space)", "off against" and so on. Since case
> distinctions can't help you out with some of the heavy lifting, memory is
> taxed another way by having to remember that many more separate lexical
> items. Oh well.
>
That's the reason that I avoided a prepositional case, it could feasibly
triple the number of prepositions I have, unless I did what we do in
English, such as "in the manner of", "out from under", that sort of
thing, where we have phrases where one word would be in another
language.

There's no real "better way", each one has its advantages and
disadvantages.

--
Robert