Re: Arvorec plural endings, replacement of cases

On Wed, 6 Jun 2001 09:30:38 -0700 Tom Pullman <tom@...>
writes:
> Well, I'm not Keith, but I'm not sure whether speakers of a language
> would ever take the genitive plural for a nominative plural,
> especially if there was a still-active dative case. The genitive is
> a more basic idea than the dative: I'm not aware of any language
> with a dative that doesn't have a genitive. So if a language is
> losing its noun cases, the dative will go before the genitive, and
> if it's going to be one of them that's hijacked for the general
> plural ending it's much more likely to be the dative, I'd say.
>    Tom Pullman
> "Dochuala as borb nad légha."
> Sùgi òl yrregoon lo! Jèkeri yrrego!
-

Just a little AndAsForMyConLang note...

in my romance conlang, Judajca, the original genitives become
nominatives, while the original nominatives become construct-case.  this
is due to a shift in the mental analysis of nominative-genitive phrases:

(sorry, but i don't have my latin dictionary handy to come up with actual
examples)

phrases like:
water of-life

become re-analyzed as:
water-of life

when Romance is overlayed on a Hebrew system in which only the second
from is possible.


-Stephen (Steg)
 "sleep, like a fog, blew over him." ~ _gilgamesh_