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Re: Cases, again

From:Herman Miller <hmiller@...>
Date:Thursday, March 18, 2004, 2:26
Andreas Johansson wrote:

> There's apparently a universal against prepositions governing the nominative. > Unaware of this, I made all prepositions in the Klaishic languages govern it.
English speakers are taught to use the nominative after "than" (under the theory that "than" is "really" a conjunction), but I've never heard anyone use it that way in actual speech. Some of my older languages have prepositions that govern the nominative: the Rynnan prepositions "tás" (meaning "as") and "vno" ("through") for example. Cythin has a lot of prepositions that govern the nominative, but these mostly correspond with Rynnan prepositions that govern the adessive case, so it's possible that the nominative and adessive cases have simply merged in Cythin. But since these are non-human languages (spoken by Nelya), "universals" don't necessarily apply to them. Are there really no languages with prepositions governing the nominative? Does that also apply to the absolutive in ergative langs?

Replies

Mark J. Reed <markjreed@...>
Nik Taylor <yonjuuni@...>
Andreas Johansson <andjo@...>
Apollo Hogan <apollo@...>