Re: Cases and Prepositions (amongst others)

>
>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?>
    As you may know, Latin used only two of its 5 cases with preps.--
accusative where the prep. indicated "motion to, toward, in, into, on, "
ablative where it was "motion from, out of, away from" as well as
instrumental. A few preps. could take either case, with change of meaning.
Some govern one case or another without any apparent semantic basis-- sub
'under' + abl.    Plus a few plain acc. forms with locative meaning-- Romam,
domum.   Interestingly too, a few verbs governed cases other than
accusative-- memini 'remember' + genitive, utor 'use' + ablative.

       Most Indo Eur. langs. IIRC never used the nom. or voc. after preps.
-- but that doesn't mean _you_ can't  ;-)

>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 don't see how such expressions could be pronominal-- more like
conjuctions??-- but I can see where they might have to agree with the case
of whatever element they refer back to.  OTOH, consider Latin _propter_
'because of' which takes acc. , or purely abl. expression like _simile modo_
'in like manner' (probably an instr. usage?).

Sorry I can't go further afield; Indonesian langs. don't have cases; Kash
uses genitive, dative and accusative more or less like German, but there are
only a few "real" prepositions.