'per': was: Artyom Kouzminykh: Answers & proposal

On Fri, 20 Aug 1999, Charles wrote:

> Lingua Franca seems to have had only one case, plus the use of prepositional
> "per" to mark anything other than the subject (which need not be nominative).
> Very weird, even "worse" than Spanish "a" for both accusative and dative.
That's actually a very well-known phenomenon: most pidgins will have
one preposition that indicates all sorts of relations. For example,
Tok Pising _bilong_, Denden _tan_ ;-) and there are others. See
Holm (John Holm. 1988. _Pidgins and Creoles_. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, esp. p. 73) for details. That page has made me
wonder whether more 'naive' conlangs have a pidgin-like construction.
(With naive, I mean, conlangs made when the conlanger didn't have
much linguistic knowledge, like me when I started out with Denden.)

Boudewijn Rempt  | http://denden.conlang.org/~bsarempt