Re: stress and accusative in Uusisuom

At 6:19 pm -0400 3/5/01, David Peterson wrote:
>In a message dated 5/3/01 12:21:46 PM, Daniel44@BTINTERNET.COM writes:
>
><< 'The book is for him'
>
>
>In this sentence, in what case is the word 'him'? >>
>
>    Typologically, benefactive; in English, prepositional; in common
>languages where this happens, Dative; in Latin, ablative.
Ahem - in Latin it's the Dative: hic liber _ei_ est.

Though this could have the same meaning as the French: ce livre-ci est à
lui - i.e. The book's his - he's got the book.

If one wanted to be less ambiguous one could say: hic liber est pro te -
where we have the prep. _pro_ governing the ablative.

But what it can't be is the plain ablative.  Apart from the ablative
absolute construction, one must have nouns or pronouns referring to persons
in the plain ablative case - they must be governed by a preposition.

In English, of course, the pronouns after prepositions take exactly the
same forms as they do as objects (whether direct or indirect) of verbs -
half a century in my old Grammar School (which they really did teach
grammar) it was called the 'objective case'.

Thus Daniel has two options:
1. if "for" is expressed as a preposition or postposition then "him" is
whatever case the pre-/post-positions governs in his language (this varies
tremendously, tho AFAIK only Esperanto has prepositions governing the
nominative - but examples of all other case, except vocative, are found in
natlangs)
2. for-him is a single word, i.e. a case form of the pronoun 'him'.  In a
Latinate language it would be the dative.  But other cases are possible,
e.g. the benefactive as David says.

Clearly he has chosen the second option, since.....

At 2:38 am -0400 4/5/01, Andreas Johansson wrote:
>Daniel44 wrote:
>>Hi Matt,
>>
>>'Kiroja suuollu yllule'
>>
>>kiroja = (the) book
>>suuollu = is (3rd person singular of the verb 'suuti' - to be)
>>yllu = he
>>le = for
>>
>>Translation: 'the book is for him'
>
>Since you write "yllule" as a single word (rather than as pronoun plus
>postposition "yllu le"), I'd be tempted to analyze it as case-inflected
>form. A "benefactive" or "dative" case I guess.
So would I - and as Daniel doesn't seem to hold Latin in high regard, maybe
he'd better go for "benefactive"  :)

Ray.

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A mind which thinks at its own expense
will always interfere with language.
                   [J.G. Hamann 1760]
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