Re: a case-free language?

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.)

Why is it that Finnish is described as having cases, while the related
Hungarian is described as not having any? Is it because Hungarian
affixes are added to an invariable word stem (except for -val/-vel
IIRC) while Finnish endings change the word stem?

Explanations are welcome.

Yours confusedly,
--
Philip Newton <philip.newton@...>
Watch the Reply-To!

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