Re: CHAT: fantasy (was: Re: history of conlanging)

Herman Miller wrote:

> On Mon, 22 Nov 1999 13:43:10 -0600, Matt Pearson
> One of the Elvish languages, Sortal (some of you may remember my previous
> mention of the "tal" element as a recurring Kolagian root for "language"),
> had the interesting property of being a source language for magical spells
> and incantations. In one story I wrote many years ago, an Elvish wizard
> chants the Sortal phrase "kavtar relennevo taxkarnol", which has the effect
> of transforming a jewel into a dragon.
>
> (ObConlang: is there a name for the case marked by -evo in Sortal, meaning
> "into" as used with verbs of transformation?)

I don't know, but I'd call it a "transformational illative."
("Illative" means "a case that expresses the meaning 'into'")

Interestingly, the phrase "turn into" meaning "become" exists in
Latin exactly the way it exists in English: "vertere in <acc>" (in+acc
is the Latin equivalent of English "into").

The one may in fact derive from the other; "turn" is not a Germanic
word; it came (via Old English "tornian" if I remember correctly but I
may be confabulating that) from the Romance "tornare," which was
equivalent to Classical Latin "vertere."

The use of such a case seems to imply a spatial metaphor, where the
old and new forms are conceived of as regions in space, and the
transformation consists of a movement from one into the other.

This is in contrast to words like "become," which don't seem to me to
imply any such metaphor.  (If there's one hidden in the fact that
"come" is part of "become," it's sure catachresized to the point that
it's no longer accessible to my consciousness.)

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