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O tempora! Naming the case.

From:Mark J. Reed <markjreed@...>
Date:Friday, December 24, 2004, 19:49
Once again, time is playing tricks with a conlang of mine.  Some of you
may recall that Okaikiar has a temporal marker (o-), which lends a
preference for temporal over spaital interpretation of the morpheme to
which it is prefixed; what that means is intuitive in some cases
("where" becomes "when"), and simply conventional in others ("speech"
becomes the proper name of the language).

I'm working on a new, as-yet unnamed, conlang, which is, like Okaikiar,
a priori and highly inflectional.  And one of the noun cases is specifically
a temporal version of the locative - it designates when something
takes place.  For instance, in the translation of "Christmas is celebrated
tomorrow", the noun for "tomorrow" would be in this case.

All the natlang examples of which I'm aware simply re-use locative
constructs for this purpose (I'd love to hear about ones that don't), so I'm
at something of a loss when it comes to naming the case.   I don't like
"temporal locative" - too wordy.  And for some reason just "temporal"
doesn't sound very case-namish to me, although I could live with it.
But I'd appreciate hearing any other ideas.

Thanks, and happy $WINTER_HOLIDAY to all!

-Marcos

Replies

bob thornton <arcanesock@...>
Mark J. Reed <markjreed@...>McGuffey in Curnalis [Re: O tempora! Naming the case.]