Re: Language universal?

>
>Musing on a new thread here . . .
>
>A while ago, someone mentioned that prepositions do not ever govern the
>nominative case in languages that mark case.
I assume genitive don't count? Otherwise, English do mark case and have
nominative after prepositions ...

>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."
You won't be the only exception - my conlang also uses the nominative after
propositions (it's got a case inventory of nom, acc, dat and gen)! Hmm, and
I thought is was so "clean" with the acc and dat (almost) only used for
direct and indirect object respetively ...

                                                             Andreas

>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?  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."
>
>:)
>
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