Re: Noun Cases

>- spatial: nominative becomes locative, accusative becomes allative
(Latin
>has the same), genitive because delative (what you call ablative. Also
not
>too much of a stretch).
According to the definitions here:

http://www.sil.org/linguistics/GlossaryOfLinguisticTerms/

the "delative" refers to movement 'down from' (as in "He
came down from the hill", "An angel descended from heaven"),
while the "ablative" would refer merely to movement 'from'
("I got here from there").

Unfortunately, the terminology of cases is very unclear
and full of misnomers in actual usage. I've recently
pointed out the example of Basque so-called 'prolative'
case (-tzat), a misnomer for equative/essive ('as/for'
in "I took him for an Irish" and "He works as a reporter").
The proper meaning of "prolative" is supposed to be that
of movement 'along/by/across/through' (as in "We strolled
along the riverbank", "He walked by [her] but didn't greet
her", "Their new sleigh travelled easily across the frozen
lake", "She left through the door", "I sent the package
by airmail"), a case that exists for example in Finnish
(-tse: "jäitse", across the ice; "postitse", by mail).
Hungarian grammars inexplicably call "sublative" a case
(-ra/re) that actually means 'onto' ("az asztalra", onto
the table), even given that the "sub-" part in the name
is so obvious. A real sublative, of course, would be one
that referred to movement 'into a lower position than',
as in "Put it under the table".


>>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.
>
>In my Azak, I have a causative case for the cause of an action (answer to
>the question "why") and a case called "final" (not my invention, I saw it
>elsewhere. But it was so long ago that I don't remember where it was :
(( )
>for the goal of the action (answer to the question "what for"). I never
>found they were close enough to share a single case. On the contrary,
they
>feel rather opposite to me...
A motive is the 'because of' prompter that answers "Why?"
and a goal is the 'so that/in order to' intention that
answers "What for?". So regarding the sequence of events,
one precedes and the other follows, and in that sense
they are opposite. But often, what is perceived as the
motive of an action is simply the desire to attain its
goal, so that a distinction between cause and purpose
seems irrelevant and the whole thing is perceived simply
as "the underlying reason".

In Spanish, we use "por" for the cause and "para" for the
purpose: "¿por qué y para qué?" (why and what for?). "Por"
also serves as the merger, especially when talking about
people, e.g. "Lo hice por ti" (I did it for you) would
usually mean that the action was done because of the
desire to attain the goal of being of service to you, so
that both the cause and the purpose are centered around
"you": you were perceived to need help and that motivated
me to do something in order to help you, so that "you"
are the overall reason of my action. The use of "para"
with people is understood as destinative, which sometimes
can be distinguished from purpose (e.g. in "He hecho esto
para ti para que te sirva de pisapapeles", I've done this
for you so that it serves you as a paperweight). The use
of "por culpa de" (through the fault of) refers only to
the motive ("Lo hice por tu culpa", I did it through your
fault), but has a negative connotation.

Cheers,
Javier