Re: Cases and Prepositions (amongst others)

>From: Robert Hailman <robert@...>
>Date: Tue, 6 Jun 2000 21:58:46 -0400
>
>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.
>
>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.
>
>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?
>
>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?
>
>Anyways, thanks for your time, and I look forward to an answer.
>
>--
>Robert
In Latin and Russian, not all cases can take prepositions. You could even
have a separate case just for prepositions. In Latin, prepositions indcating
motion take the accusative and all others the
ablative. In Greek, all three oblique (non-nominative, non-vocative) cases
are used. Thus, in+accusative means 'into', but in+abl means 'in(side)'. I
have never
heard of one which uses nominatives as objects of the prepositions, but
there may be one.
In my Early Lahabic nouns may be in genitive, dative, locative, or
accusative cases, but this is due to a four-way contrast within
prepositions. 'Motion towards' takes the accusative, 'motion away from'
takes the genitive, 'location in or near', or the opposite of 'motion
towards', takes the genitive, and 'location outside and far'
takes the dative.

Can you give a theoretical example of these pronouns (and can one decline
them)? Are 'I-at-this-time sat down to eat dinner' what you had in mind?
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