Re: Cases, again

Dear Michael,
What you have to remember is that the terms for cases (never mind the cases
themselves) are not carved in stone. Whilst genitive is reasonably defined
on a purely semantic level (i.e., it's the "of" or "apostrophe-s" case of a
noun), some languages will insist that certain constructions use a given
case for what may appear to be non-grammatical reasons. I believe Russian
nouns go into the genitive after the number 5 for instance - so you have
"two men" but "five of men".
As to the dative - no, I don't think most languages would define your
example as being dative. The dative is usually defined as the case "for
which something is done" and often translates 'to' or 'for' in English. It
is here that you need to be very careful with 'to' as it can mean both
'dative to' (I gave a bone to the dog) and 'directional to' (I walked up to
the dog) - never mind the use of 'to' as an infinitive marker (actually a
disguised dative) as in 'I want to go out'. I think that's where you're
having your problem, in seeing that since the dative can be used to
translate 'the dative to' then 'to' is always translated by the dative.
For instance, my language Omeina has no infinitives. The idea of the
infinitive is translated by [verb stem] + [suffix that makes abstract noun]
+ [dative case] giving constructions of the form "I want for the going" for
English "I want to go"  =  meninalde mina (men- + ina- + lde).
You will probably find that certain prepositions will govern certain case
endings (as in German, Latin...) so that for example your term for "across"
may not have a case for itself but may cause the relevant noun to go into
(say) the locative case as Omeina does (e gildoa 'across the river', gildo =
river). Your lang may not have a locative of course so you may want to put
the noun into some other case like Genitive. The fun comes when you start
asking yourself "WHY does this go into such-and-such a case and not
another?) - you are creating a history for your lang now!

>
> Now, along the same lines, in a sentence like, "I went to the man's
> house" my assumption would be that "man" is in the genitive and "house"
> is in the dative case. Is that correct? Now what about, "we heard the
> man's voice"? Would the same pattern hold? "Man" in genitive, "voice"
> in dative?
>
> ---------------------------------------------------
> Michael David Martin, Master Mason
> S. W. Hackett Lodge #574
> Free & Accepted Masons of California
>

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