Re: Cases, again

Garth Wallace wrote:
> Japanese uses nouns for more specific directions than just "to" and
> "from". The Japanese equivalent of "into the box" translates more
> literally as "to the inside of the box".
Of course, forms like _naka ni_ (which should more accurately probably
be written _nakani_ or _naka-ni_; "no", "ni", "e", "wa", "ga" and "o"
are really more like suffixes than the traditional analysis of
postpositions/particles) could be interpreted as postpositions governing
the genitive.

Michael Martin 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?
In most languages, yes.  But, you might want to consider the
alternative, used in some languages: A special case indicating that a
noun is possessed by something else.  Thus, you'd have "I went
house-possessed man-dative", "I heard voice-possessed man-dative", "I
bought book-possessed man-acc" ("I bought the man's book"), etc.

(Of course, in these examples, the case could be different, the point
I'm making is just which noun is marked)

Mark Reed wrote:
> > Now what about, "we heard the
> > man's voice"? Would the same pattern hold? "Man" in genitive, "voice"
> > in dative?
>
> No, "voice" would be in the accusative case, because it is the object of
> the verb.
>
> The above assumes we're talking about an accusative language, of course,
> and not ergative, etc.
Depends on the language.  In some languages, "voice" would be marked
with a case other than accusative.  In Japanese, for example, "we" would
be marked as dative, and "voice" as nominative.