Re: Cases, again

In "I went to the man's house", "house would be more
often an accusative (ad + Acc in Latin for ex).

But the main problem is : how do we define Accusative
? Once more, Accusative is a purely syntactic case; it
has not the same signification in both sentences to
mention:
- I went to the man's house (directed movement)
- We heard the man's voice (perception)

There are many more meanings for accusative, like in
"I looked at the man" (intention included), or "I
walked for 2 hours" (2 hours being treated as an
Accusative in Latin; duration complement), plus of
course the most "natural" use of accusative (object of
an action: I took the book).

And it's just the same for genitive. In "the man's
house", genitive expresses possession (this being
social convention), but in "the man's voice", or "the
man's hand", even if we also call those "possession",
it's not at all the same kind of possession. Then
genitive also can express origin, etc, etc.

I'm interested by the concept of the "collapsing" of
cases. When considering how illogical and messy cases
are used in natlangs nowadays, one always has kind of
a feeling that earlier, in some "golden age", there
were really significant cases, probably a great deal
of them, and that little by little people didn't
understand them any more, and mixed up everything, or
just got rid of them. This is probably a false theory,
because one couldn't see why our ancestors, much more
primitive than we are and much less mastering logic
and rationnality than we do, would have come up to a
perfectly logical and complete system. So, why is this
feeling so strong ?

--- Michael Martin <mdmartin@...> wrote:
> OK, first of all, thank you to everyone who
> answered.
>
> If I understand correctly, the basic answer to my
> question of what case
> to use is: it's up to me to make the rule. And, yes,
> my intention for
> my conlang is to have prepositions, but it never
> occurred to me that
> the exact meaning of the preposition could be
> dependent upon the case
> of the noun it is being used with. That's something
> I'll have to give
> some thought to.
>
> 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?

=====
Philippe Caquant

"He thought he saw a Rattlesnake / That questioned him in Greek: / He looked
again, and found it was / The Middle of Next Week. / "The one thing I regret',
he said, / "Is that it cannot speak !' " (Lewis Carroll)

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