Re: Prepositions and case

Peter Collier wrote:
[snip]
> These prepositions of course govern various cases in Latin. Some of
> the cases (e.g Ablative) are not present in my conlang.
Some? There were only two cases possible after prepositions in Classical
Latin - the accusative or the ablative.

> In other
> instances the case still exists, but the 'meaning' of the preposition
> has shifted into a different case  - for example 'apud' governed the
> accusative in Latin, but is now not used in its original sense and
> has instead replaced 'cum', which governed the ablative.
'Cum' governed the ablative in Classical Latin. But in fact in less
literary Latin we find complete confusion between accusative & ablative
with prepositions. Some case of 'accusative preposition' used with
ablative are doubtless instances of hypercorrection!

Modern Romance forms such as _con nosco_ (con(n)nosco) and _con vosco_
(convosco) surely hark back to VL *noscu(m) and *voscu(m) showing
postposited _cum_ used with the accusative.

> So I have two questions in my mind:
>
> Ultimately I have three distinct cases - a combined
> Nominative/Accusative, Genitive and Dative. What should happen to the
> ablative prepositions when, very early on,  I lose the ablative case?
Presumably what clearly happened in the spoken language - the
prepositions are all used with the accusative.

> Morphologically speaking, the case merges wth the accusative (and
> thence subsequently with the nominative), so would any
> ablative-governing preposition stay as it was and become accusative
> by default,
Yes, they did, in fact.

> or would a speaker feel that that felt wrong, that it
> needed an indirect case, and shift it to the Dative?
A speaker of the Classical language would not lose the ablative. S/he
would most certainly feel using the dative (singular) to be wrong. A
speaker of the  colloquial language had no problem: there was no
ablative and all prepositions governed the accusative.

> Interestingly,
> the Latin division of the prepositions between ablative and
> accusative neatly mirrors the division in German between dative and
> accusative,
No - only for four of them: in, sub, subter, super.

A few took the ablative only, namely: a(b), coram, cum, de, e(x), palam,
prae, pro, sine.

All the rest governed the accusative, _irrespective_ of whether there
was motion or not. For example, _ad_ could mean "toward(s)" or "at,
near" - but it _always_ governed the accusative.

> which lead me to this question.
>
> Secondly, when the meaning of a preposition shifts (e,g, apud), would
> there be a corresponding change in the case it governed?
There is no precedence for that in Latin. The evidence is clear that in
Vulgar Latin the whole lot of them simply governed the accusative.

A similar process happened in Greek. The modern language has lost the
dative, and all prepositions govern the accusative (even the ancient
ones that governed the genitive now govern the accusative, even tho the
modern language still retains the genitive case).
------------------------------------
Benct Philip Jonsson wrote:
[snip]
>
> I think ablative prepositions would shift to dative, since
> ablative and dative were alike in the plural.
But they didn't!

It's true that in the Classical language the dative & ablative plurals
are always identical. If Peter is constructing one of those conlangs
that, because of some quirk in an alternative history, derived from
_Classical_ Latin (i.e. he is producing a 'latlang' derived from the
'lingua Latina', rather than a romlang derived from 'lingua Romanica')
then who knows? It's anyone's guess.

But the evidence is clear that in the spoken, colloquial language the
ablative had become moribund, probably before the end of the BC era. We
find written examples of 'ablative preposition' governing the accusative
plural. For phonological reasons the ablative & accusatives singulars
had fallen together, and the ablative in all its uses was simply
replaced by analytic constructions, i.e. preposition + accusative.

It is noteworthy that modern Romance forms derived from a conflation
from dative and ablative, i.e. third person pronouns in them all, nouns
generally in Romanian, while the singular is derived from the ancient
dative, the plural is invariably derived from ancient genitive forms.

--
Ray
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http://www.carolandray.plus.com
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Frustra fit per plura quod potest
fieri per pauciora.
[William of Ockham]

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