Re: Noun Cases

En réponse à Mark J. Reed :


>Indeed not.  I originally had no genitive case in Okaikiar, using the
>ablative for that purpose.  Actually, at that point in time I was
>calling it the "elative", so ryour "delative" makes the third name I've
>seen for that case.  I changed the name to "ablative" when I learned
>the original sense of that case, which makes sense given the name; but
>my study of Latin had given me a slew of associations with "ablative"
>that have nothing to do with motion away from.
Which is the reason why I don't use the term "ablative" in my descriptions 
of Moten. Latin is to blame :)) .

>CG> - temporal: nominative indicates moment, accusative indicates duration,
>CG>   and genitive indicates frequency.
>
>Now that is an interesting use!  The mapping seems somewhat odd and arbitrary
>to me, though; how did you come up with it?
Actually, it's not that arbitrary, and very much influenced by natlangs: 
Latin and German both use accusative with prepositions indicating duration, 
and German uses genitive forms (sometimes fossilised as adverbs) for 
frequency (remember the "vielmals" argument?). So if there is 
arbitrariness, it's a common one :)) .


>Okaikiar has the same, but with a somewhat narrower scope: the locative
>can mean either "place where" or "moment when", and likewise the
>ablative ("place from which", "moment since which") and allative ("place
>toward which", "moment until which"), there are prefixes to indicate
>whether the spatial or temporal sense is intended.  In this purely
>disambiguating sense they are rarely needed, but they have another
>purpose.  The pronoun "I" (among other words) does triple duty in
>Okaikiar, referring not only to the speaker, but in the locative case to
>the speaker's location in space or time (the adverbs "here" or "now").
>You can put the temporal prefix on the nominative etc. when you need to
>refer to the *noun* "now", as in the phrase "Now is the time."
Interesting. Moten has specific local and temporal pronouns, which take the 
roles taken by local and temporal adverbs in other tongues. But being 
pronouns they are used like nouns, i.e. they decline and have nominal 
function in the sentence.


>The "final" case, eh?  I'll have to think about that.
>In a sense they are opposites, but in another sense they are equivalent.
Not for me. As described before, the cause preceeds the action, the goal 
follows it. I've never made the confusion between those things.


>After all, is the motive of an action not the desire to achieve the goal
>of that action?
Yes, but the desire to achieve a goal is not the goal itself. And the cause 
can be something having nothing to do with the goal. The cause of my being 
on the list is because I'm a conlanger. The goal of my being on the list is 
to keep contact with other conlangers and learning things. You can't 
compare them here.

>   Knowing the one, you know the other.  And FWIW, in my
>'lect, "why?" and "what for?" are used interchangeably.
See my example above. In this case "why" and "what for" are clearly not 
interchangeable.

Christophe Grandsire.

http://rainbow.conlang.free.fr

You need a straight mind to invent a twisted conlang.