Re: forming sentences...
| From: | Robert Hailman <robert@...> |
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| Date: | Tuesday, May 1, 2001, 1:39 |
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Yeah, there are a whole lot - cases are *very* open ended, so you can
have as many as you think of, although that would certainly seem very
artificial. No language AFAIK has all of those, although some languages
have a lot. Somewhere in the range of 5 or so seems to be fairly common
in natural language - my language, Ajuk, has 7, Latin had 6, German has
4, and so on. Russian is around that range, too.
Exceptions aren't hard to find, though - Finnish has a whackload,
although the number eludes me.
Generally, beyond the cases in a language, pre/postpositions take the
same function - hypothetically, you could have no case and have
everything with some sort of pre/postpositions. That's an idea I've
toyed with, although I've never gotten far.
--
Robert
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