Re: Thagojian Cases and Pronouns

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

Reply