Re: Thagojian Cases and Pronouns

On 6 Oct 2003 at 21:55, Herman Miller wrote:

> 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.
> >
[snip my list]
> Ablative (from) and elative (out of) could also be useful.
I've thought about it. I'm coming up with an almost completely new
inflection matrix for both verbs and nouns as it is, and the new one
is nearly three times the size of the old one. Adding yet more would
be hard.

As I was typing, I had the idea to use Case Modifiers, an idea I used
wááááááy back in the dim and distant days of Wenetaic. Between the
word and the case clitic, include an optional clitic with the meaning
of "Anti-".

Hmmmmmm. Maybe there's promise there. I shall ponder.

> >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".
That's exactly what I'm doing, except that the Adessive and Inessive
cases wont literally mean "near" and "within", but more like "not
quite touching" and "touching". Maybe Adessive and Locative are
better names for them?

FWIW, Thagojian marks possession on the possessed noun, and sentence
fragments are very unweildy because of that. To twizzle the example a
tadge, it would be

"box inside.GEN ball I.throw.INSTR.INESS"

(as well as some additonal linking flourishes) for

"I throw the ball into 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".
I still want to be able to distinguish somehow between "actually at"
a place and "nearly at" the same place. It's a logistical nightmare,
but it allows for great clarity of speech. I'm growing ever more
enamored with the idea of an "Anti-x" clitic, which will let me relax
a bit on the case-matrix creation.

Hmm. Maybe a "Nearly-x" clitic, too? Then I could drop all the way
back to just the Locative and the Allative and leave it at that.
Actually, a "Nearly-x" clitic could help out with the derivation of
adjectives, and all manner of wonderful stuff. I may be on to
something here.

I think

"box inside.GEN ball I.throw.INSTR.ALL"

works okay under those circumstances?


Paul