Re: Cases, again

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]

Replies