Re: Cases and Prepositions (amongst others)

"Thomas R. Wier" wrote:
>
> Robert Hailman wrote:
>
> > > 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.  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.
> > > The same can of course be said about other languages:  most English
> > > speakers would say, I think, 'at this time', while the literal translation
> > > of the German 'zu dieser Zeit' is 'to this time'.  The same goes for
> > > phrases like 'at hand', where German uses IIRC 'zu Hand'.
> >
> > I've decided to make my prepositions each have one and only one meaning,
> > so the English preposition structure won't be very helpful when I do
> > that, because I'll have to break it down anyways.
>
> Of course.  There's no problem with that.  It does run contrary to language
> universals, however.  Most languages try to make maximum use out of the
> kinds of morphological and syntactic systems they have:  past tense markers
> like English <-ed>, for example, can be applied to other areas of verb
> morphology like the English subjunctive.  This is only something to consider
> before you design certain areas of your language;  if you don't care, then that's
> fine.  Afterall, as John said, you have Esperanto as an example (nominative
> with prepositions --> contrary to universals).
More properly, I meant to say one one meaning in each case, for example
a different preposition for "at (time)" then for "at (place)". My
language isn't meant to keep with the language universals, although it
does in some cases, so I'm not terribly worried about going against
them.

--
Robert