Re: Verbs derived from noun cases

At 18:34 24/04/2004 +0200, you wrote:
>Hi!
>
>Ray Brown <ray.brown@...> writes:
> > On Thursday, April 22, 2004, at 02:51 PM, Henrik Theiling wrote:
> >...
> > > I'd consider one case the same as zero cases. :-)
> >
> > IMO it doesn't make sense to talk of nouns & pronouns having one case.
> > That'd mean all the world's languages decline their nouns & pronouns which
> > seems to me counter-intuitive.
>
>Hmm, I don't mean by case that the nouns are morphologically changed.
>E.g. Chinese also has two cases (the one in front of the verb and the
>one after) but marks none by morphological processes.  In contrast to
>your intuition, I find it counterintuitive to speak of zero cases,
>since with no case, you cannot talk. :-)
I don't find "case" to be a particularly useful term for discussing
Khangaþyagon morphology, becasue its agglutinating structure means that it
has thousands of distinct noun forms. My own terminology is that the noun
carries up to six "segunakar" (suffixes), which mark various grammatical
distinctions. When the number of noun forms is greater than you can
comfortably list on one page when written out in full, I think the concept
of case breaks down.

Pete