Re: Noun Cases

JC> The distinction, when it is made (not always), is that "why?" asks for the
JC> material cause of something,

Where "material" = "immediate"?  What legal jargon refers to as the
"prima facie" cause?

JC> but "wherefore?" asks for the final cause: the purpose or justification.

Hm.  That could map onto the distinction implied by Okaikiar morphology.

To elaborate: Okaikiar has a set of three related cases representing origin,
point, and destination of motion: ablative, locative, allative.  In
something of a logical stretch, I used the same morpohological
relationship shared by those three cases for the nominative, accusative,
and dative, mapping nominative to ablative (the subject of the action
being where it originates), the dative to the allative (the beneficiary
or recipient of the action being its "destination"), and the accusative
to the locative (by default, but there's also an argument to be made
that the action is taking place at the point of intersection with the
object).

Extending the analogy further, one can envision a three-way relationship
between the motive behind an action (analogous to ablative/nominative),
the goal of the action (analogous to allative/dative), and the means
used to accomplish the action (the instrumental case, here analogous to
locative/accusative).  But the distinction between motive and goal is
kind of fuzzy, so I lumped them together into the "causative", using the
"motive" ending type.

Assuming I did adopt a distinction here, the next question would be what
to call the cases.  They can't both be "causative", and it's not clear
that that's a good name for either when the other exists.  Perhaps a "motive"
case and an "objective" case, although the latter unfortunately
conflicts with the term for the English accusative-and-then-some case.

-Mark

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