Re: Cases, again

Roger Mills wrote:

>Andreas Johansson wrote:
>(re prepositions governing the nominative due to merger of "prepositional"
>cases with nom.)
>
>
>>What does worry me is that one would think that such mergers would occur
>>
>>
>with
>
>
>>some frequency in natlangs too, wherefore if the universal is good we're
>>
>>
>left
>
>
>>with the implication that such systems collapse quickly.
>>
>>
>>
>It seems to me that it has occured --partially, it's true-- in English and
>the Romance langs.  I think in Dutch too; how about the Scand. languages?
>What about Hindi and other Indic langs. -- any cases left there? Are
>pronouns treated differently than nouns?
>
>Although there is no question of cases present in the past, or lost/merged,
>note that in Malay/Indonesian and probably many of their relatives,
>prepositions take the "nominative" (or "base") form of nouns and pronouns.
>True, it's possible in colloq. speech to reduce pronouns to their
>_possessive suffix_ forms---
>dengan saya/dia 'with me/him' ~ denganku ~dengannya
>kepada kamu 'to you'  ~kepadamu
>
>Consider too that in some form of "Future Engl.", the nominative forms of
>the pronouns will vanish-- along with "...taller than him/me etc" we already
>have such things as "it's me",  "Me and John (~John 'n' me; John and
>him...etc) went to the movies...".  Then we'd be left with the inexplicable
>but deeply ingrained exception, "...between you and I" :-((   [scrapes
>fingernails on chalkboard]
>
>
>
'between you and I'?  I say 'between you and me'.  Ah, dialectal
differences abound.

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