Re: Set of basic adpositions

AFMCL, I've been playing thought-experiments with Terzemian lately,
and it seems there are three basic postpositions, simply "to", "at",
and "from".

I'm kinda having trouble though, because there are what feel like a
whole suite of secondary adpositions (that physically nuzzle between
the noun and the postposition proper), forming an
agglutinative/analytical grid of 18 "metapostpositions", of which
perhaps 10 or 12 appear to be meaningful. Languages being what they
are, the "rows" of the table (where the columns are "to", "at" and
"from") are not entirely regular, and therefore the surface forms are
not entirely regular either.

It's a mess, and one I'm having trouble coming to terms with. My
prevailing thought is that there are three cases (grammatical roles
being marked on the verb), the Dative, Locative, and Ablative (or
maybe Genitive), each of which govern a few postpositions that may or
may not look regular when compared with any given other one.

So, to answer Ray's original question, Terzemian has three, 18,
10-ish, or maybe 6. FWIW, there's Natlang relevance, as Georgian was
much on my mind when building the system, as (unfortunately?) was
Turkish. For those who don't have my complete conlanging history in
their heads, the system ultimately derives from the (phonetically
regular but semantically a bit haphazard) 3-dimensional grid that was
in Wenetaic (which partly begat the second version of Thagojian, which
begat Terzemian).

And, if you're anything like as confused as I am now, I'll just say
"Glad to be of service" ;-)




Paul

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