Re: Language universal?

Jesse S. Bangs wrote:

>A while ago, someone mentioned that prepositions do not ever govern the
>nominative case in languages that mark case.
Quite not true, I fear...  Turkish does have adpositions (they are
indeed postpositions, but I think it doesn't matter) that govern
the nominative of nominals other than the singular pronouns:

   siz-in için
   you:GEN for
   "For you (sing.)"

   siz-ler için
   you:PL.NOM for
   "For you (plur.)"

   bu adam için
   this man.NOM for
   "For this man"

Data and examples from Blake 1994.

>Unfortunately, my conlang
>Yivríndil does just that, and so I says to myself, "This won't do.  I
>don't mind breaking a language universal every now and then, since they
>all have *some* exceptions, but this one was claimed to have *no*
>exceptions!  And I don't want to be the only exception out there, since I
>strive for naturalness in my lang."
In my opinion, you can stop worrying and keep your language as it
is now!

BTW, it is my very humble opinion, and please don't flame me for
this, that many so-called universals are just statistical data
about the known languages.  But how many languages disappeared
without ever being described?  And how many languages will appear
in the future?

>So I did a little syntactic
>slight-of-hand and decided that prepositions govern the accusative case,
>which is cheating since *the accusative case is never marked*.  There was
>an accusative ending that survived in pronouns until a few hundred years
>ago (con-timeline), but it's fallen out of use.
:-)

>Is this cheating?
Yes, strictly speaking, I think this was cheating! ;-)  Very nice
attempt, though!

Happy conlanging,

Tommaso.

--------------------------------------------------------------
        GLOSSOPOIESIS, "The hidden art of tongue making"
              Web: <http://www.glossopoiesis.net/>
  E-mail: trd@glossopoiesis.net ICQ: Glossopoietes (#24209008)
--------------------------------------------------------------