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Re: Thagojian Cases and Pronouns

From:Herman Miller <hmiller@...>
Date:Tuesday, October 7, 2003, 1:51
On Mon, 6 Oct 2003 19:51:06 -0400, Paul Bennett <paul-bennett@...>
wrote:

>It has struck me that I need more cases in Thagojian. I have >been trying for a long time to do with as few as possible, >but it's looking more and more likely that it just ain't >going to work. > >Currently, I have: > >Ergative >Nominative/Absolute >Accusative >Genetive >Locative/Instrumental >Dative > >I'm thinking of expanding this list to at maybe a dozen. For >example, I shall separate Locative (and maybe further into >Adessive (Near) and Inessive (Within)) and Instrumental, and >split Dative into Allative (Towards) and Benefactive (For), >as well as probably add Essive (As sth), Translative >(Becoming sth), and maybe Partitive (Part of sth).
Ablative (from) and elative (out of) could also be useful.
>This leads to all kinds of new work in the linker affixes, >but prevents my having to resort to prepositions, which work >in an incredibly clunky way, if at all. Maybe a better >solution is to get better prepositions, but that's a >question for a later time.
You could also do something like Japanese, which uses a noun "inside" rather than having a separate particle for "in". So for instance "in the box" could be "box-GEN inside-LOC" (or "inside-LOC box-GEN", whichever order the genitive noun usually goes in in your language): "at the inside of the box". Then instead of having to have separate illative (into) and elative (out of) cases, you could use allative/ablative with the word for "inside". -- languages of Azir------> ---<http://www.io.com/~hmiller/lang/index.html>--- hmiller (Herman Miller) "If all Printers were determin'd not to print any @io.com email password: thing till they were sure it would offend no body, \ "Subject: teamouse" / there would be very little printed." -Ben Franklin

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Paul Bennett <paul-bennett@...>