Re: Ordering of case names [was Re: Structure of documents about your conlangs]

Quoting Jan van Steenbergen <ijzeren_jan@...>:

>  --- Tom Wier wrote:
>
> > Quoting Philip Newton <Philip.Newton@...>:
> >
> > > Mark Rosenfelder's Verdurian has verbs before nouns on his morphology
> > > page. (He also has an unusual -- to me -- order of cases, with N G A D,
> > > whereas I am used to N G D A from German and (Ancient) Greek.)
> >
> > Really? When I learned German, the order was usually N A D G
> > (which was both the listed order, and the order in which we
> > learned their functions). In Phaleran, cases are always listed
> > like the following, for full nouns: Ergative, Absolutive, Dative,
> > Instrumental, Benefactive, Durative, Abessive.  For pronouns,
> > replace "Ergative, Absolutive," with "S, A, O," (naturally, to
> > describe Phaleran's split-ergative morphology in pronouns.)
>
> Is this an order you made up yourself, or is it based on an existing
> language?
It's an order I developed for myself.  It roughly corresponds
to the textual frequency of cases. (Though the durative is probably
more frequent than the benefactive, as the durative is the catch-all
case for many postpositional uses.)

> Are there any "fixed" orders, for example in Finnish?
Not quite sure what you're getting at here.

> Like Philip, I learnt to inflect both Greek and German cases in
> N G D A order. The same order was also applied in Polish, expanded
> to N G D A I L. The vocative is usually omitted from such schemes
> and handled separately, but when it is there, it usually comes
> either last or immediately after the nominative.
I strongly suspect that the order N G D A is a result of Classically
educated grammarians using the same order for German as they use
for Latin, as this is the same order I've mostly seen for Latin.  I think
the order N A D G makes more sense from a pedagogical standpoint,
since in German the main stem distinction is between the nominative
and all other cases (der Herr : den Herrn, dem Herrn, des Herrn(s)),
and there is a sense in which the nominative is more "basic" and
textually frequent than the accusative, the accusative more so than
the dative, and the dative more so than the genitive.

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Thomas Wier            "I find it useful to meet my subjects personally,
Dept. of Linguistics    because our secret police don't get it right
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