Re: Cases, again

Hallo!

On Wed, 17 Mar 2004 19:10:00 +0000,
Ray Brown <ray.brown@...> wrote:

> [...]
>
> Ancient Greek, with Mad Martin's four cases, was a tad more interesting;
> it tended to do the following:
> - if the adposition* denoted "motion towards" it governed the accusative
> case;
> - if the adposition* denoted "motion from" it governed the genitive case;
> - if no motion was denoted, the adposition governed the dative case.
>
> For example:
> para + ACC. = to (the side of)
> para + GEN. = from (the side)
> para + DAT. = at (the side of), beside, near
>
> pros + ACC. = towards
> pros + GEN. = from
> pros + DAT. = at
>
> hypo + ACC. = (to a place) under [e.g. he ran under a tree]
> hypo + GEN. = from under
> hypo + DAT. = under, beneath [no motion]
This is a neat system, and a bit like what I am working on in Old Albic.

But in Old Albic, it is the *preposition* that takes the case marking.
Old Albic has a locative, an allative and an ablative case, eg.

mbaras   (LOC) `at the house'
mbarana  (ALL) `to the house'
mbarada  (ABL) `from the house'

Besides these cases, Old Albic has prepositions meaning `on', `in',
`below',
`near', etc., that all govern the locative.  These are actually nouns
which are inflected for case:

tharas mbaras   `behind the house'
tharana mbaras  `to behind the house'
tharada mbaras  `from behind the house'

And then, Old Albic has non-mandatory suffixaufnahme, such that the
case of the "preposition" may be (but need not be) marked on the
lexical noun as well:

tharas mbarasas   `behind the house'
tharana mbarasana `to behind the house'
tharada mbarasada `from behind the house'

All this is, however, work in progress.

Greetings,

Jörg.

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