Re: Cases, again

Quoting Roger Mills <romilly@...>:

> 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?
I'm not sure what you're saying? Certainly the neither the Scandinavian
language nor English use nominatives after prepositions despite having an
object case - nouns don't have an object case, and pronouns use the object
forms after prepositions (with a couple odd exceptions like "between you and
I"). I think this true for Dutch too.

It occurs to me, however, that some Swedish dialects supposedly has retained a
separate dative case. I do not know if they use it and/or nom/acc after
prepositions. BP?

                                                              Andreas

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