Re: Language universal?

At 3:03 pm -0500 6/2/01, Yoon Ha Lee wrote:
[....]
>
>Interesting.  :-)  Actually, I've been wondering how, if the vocative is
>only marked on singular 2nd-declension masculine nouns (and even then not
>always as in "puer" and "ager" type nouns?) in Latin, how you can call
>all the other vocatives a case when they look just like the nominative.
Good question.

>But maybe they *were* marked and dropped out.  =^)
No - it was because grammar jargon was first developed by the Greeks, where
vocative singulars are much more marked.   The Romans tended to take over
and (mis)translate Greek terms fairly unquestioningly; the Greeks have a
vocative - so must Latin.

In fact I agree with Yoon Ha. It seems to me to make much more sense to
talk about _five_ cases for Latin nouns, adjectives & pronouns: nom., acc.,
gen., dat. & abl. [British order :)  ]; and to treat the vocative like the
locative, i.e. vestigial case forms retained for a small set of nouns.

[....]
>
>And then again, to be fair, I should probably also be quibbling over
>things like neuters being the same in accusative, nominative *and*
>vocative.  :-p
That goes right back to Proto-Indo-European - the Romans merely inherited it.

>(Any Latin pedants out there, I've only been in 3 weeks
>of class so my knowledge is definitely incomplete!)
Don't worry - take it from someone who's being doing Latin for some 50
years, you're doing just fine!

>> Is this cheating?  And can anybody come up with a natlang counterexample
>> to this language universal?  If not, I claim first dibs on the
>> self-referential Jesse's Language Universal: "All language universals have
>> exceptions."
>
>Darned if I know.  I just bet someone's claimed that language universal
>already, though.  =^)
They have  :)

Ray.



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A mind which thinks at its own expense
will always interfere with language.
                   [J.G. Hamann 1760]
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