Re: a case-free language?

On Sun, 3 Oct 2004 19:28:26 +0200, Philip Newton <philip.newton@...>
wrote:

>On Fri, 1 Oct 2004 14:41:49 +0200, Henrik Theiling <theiling@...> wrote:
>> I had a long discussion about this some time ago.  And I was convinced
>> (although probaby only by making the other people have flat foreheads
>> from banging their head on the table because I am so stubborn) that
>> 'case' is something purely morphological and many languages achieve
>> the same effect (marking semantical roles and argument assignment)
>> differently, e.g. by word order (e.g. Chinese) or adpositions
>> (e.g. Japanese, Korean).  Thus these languages are said to not have
>> case.
>
>I'm a little confused, though. I'm sure someone has explained it to me
>in the past, but I've forgotten.
>
>What is it that makes Japanese be described as having no case? Would
>it not make sense to posit a single noun class with, say, nominative
>case ending -ga, accusative case ending -wo, dative case ending -he
>etc.? (After all, in Japanese one can't distinguish between
>adpositions and word endings, since word boundaries aren't marked in
>writing.)
I don't believe those are cases in a European way, at least. -wa is the
topic indicator, -ga is the subject indicator, -o is for the direct object
(not "wo"), -e (not "he"--the pronunciation of particles are weird) is used
for the destination of movement verbs ("Toukyou-e ikimashita" '[I] went to
Tokyo'), -ni would be more for dative functions but it's main purpose are
positional functions ("teeburu-no shita-ni" 'under the table'), -de
indicates an instrument or location, -no indicates possession/association,
and there are more.

From what I've heard, it's a lot more similar to "trigger" languages like
Tagalog, but for the life of me I still have no idea what "trigger" language
means.

So, with the particles, as they're called, they tend to cover more specific
arenas than European cases. I mentioned that there are more particles; there
are some particles that indicate "from" and "until" and "by", they have two
particles for "and", one indicating a complete list, another an incomplete
list, and there are still more particles.

Also note that with -wa, -o, and -e, they're spelled -ha, -wo, and -he in
the syllabary. Don't ask me why.

Buenas tardes,

Ben