Re: Set of basic adpositions

David J. Peterson wrote:
> Tok Pisin has two: bilong (genitive), and long (all else).
Presumably the meaning is made clearer, if necessary, with additional
words such as adverbs.

I guess I should take a good look at other creole languages as well.

I wondered if anyone had done anything with adpositions, similar to what
Berlin and Kay did with color terms. But we cannot, of course, infer
from Tok Pisin that if a language has only two adpositions, one will
denote a genitive relation & the other all other relations for the
simple reason that the genitive relation is so often expressed _without_
an adposition in many languages.

> Even languages like French and Spanish, though, started out
> with just the three (a, de, and en), adding others as the language
> was fleshed out (often in combination with the original three).
I know that in Old French it was only those three that formed
contractions with the definite article (in modern French it's only à and
de that retain such contractions; contracted forms with _en_ survive
only in archaism like 'maître ès arts' "master in-the arts", i.e. M.A.),
and that words like _dans_ and _avec_ began life as adverbs. But _par_
derives from Latin preposition _per_, and _pour_ from VL */por/ (= CL
/pro:/. Did they change from VL prepositions to adverbs in Proto-French
before becoming prepositions again?
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deinx nxtxr wrote:
[snip]
 > Sasxsek has a set of basic (CV) prepositions and an extended set
 > that are derived using the "-u" suffix.

What criteria did you use in determining your basic set?

 > Basic
 >
 > 	tu		= at (locative)
 > 	fu		= to, toward
 > 	mu		= away from
 > 	bu		= opposed to, against, anti, contra
 > 	iu		= of (genitive)
 > 	ku		= with (comitative)
 > 	nu		= without, sans
 > 	ju		= using, with (instrumental)
 > 	su		= via, through
 > 	lu		= called, named, by the name of

Interesting - but I would not have expected "called, named, by the name
of" to be among the _basic_ set.

--
Ray
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