Re: Cases and Prepositions (amongst others)

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.

Kou