Re: Aesthetics

Hallo!

On Fri, 26 Oct 2007 13:14:41 -0700, David J. Peterson wrote:

> Philip:
> <<
> Wikipedia says 64 cases. Where do you get "over 200" from?
>  >>
>
> It's analysis (Maria Polinsky's written about it).  Every single
> one of the locative cases has two forms: a (if I remember right)
> distal and non-distal form.  That effectively doubles the number
> of cases.  Then there was something else that bumped it up over
> 200.  I'll have to search my typology notes...  It does depend on
> analysis, though.  Masha made a pretty convincing argument.
Yes, the Daghestanian languages are famous for their rich case
inventorties, and the scholars just can't agree on how many cases
there are.  The point is, there's not a set of 64, 200 or however
many distinct case suffixes to learn.  These languages have what
I call "case construction kits": there is a series of morphemes
meaning 'on', 'in', 'under', etc., which combine with other
morphemes meaning 'from', 'to', etc., yielding dozens of cases.
An example (which just happens to be from Tsez itself):

http://www.joerg-rhiemeier.de/Conlang/caucasian.html#fig12

These case construction kits are just one of the many beautiful
exotica found in the Caucasus, and some of the daughter languages
of Old Albic will have them.

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