Re: Prepositional phrases

En réponse à Aidan Grey <frterminus@...>:

>   I'm working on Aelya prepositional phrases at the
> moment, and I wondered how you folks handle them in
> your language? In particular, do you have creative
> ways for handling the same sort of situation as my
> Aelya examples show?
>
Moten has an interesting system: it has only three cases (nominative, accusative
and genitive), but all three cases have three meanings each: "natural" (what
they are named for), spatial and temporal. So the nominative case marks the
subject of the verb, but also the place where you are or the moment in time. The
accusative case marks the object of the verb, but also the place where you go or
the duration of an event. Finally, the genitive case marks the complement of a
noun, but also the place where you come from, or the frequency of an event (how
many times it happens, every...). There are prefixes used to mark that the case
has a spatial or temporal meaning (mo- for spatial meaning and di- for temporal
meaning), but they are dropped if the meaning is clear. As for more precise
distinctions (in, out, near, through, in front, after, etc...), they are handled
by nouns (like your locative nouns, but I call them postpositions even if they
are really nouns) which take the necessary case (and definition if needed) and
are preceeded with a noun in genitive case. For instance:

umpevi melag: in the house
house-GEN-DEF inside-NOM-IND

umpevi meleag: inside the house
house-GEN-DEF inside-NOM-DEF

umpevi meldagun: into the house
house-GEN-DEF inside-ACC-IND

umpevi melvagi: from in the house
house-GEN-DEF inside-GEN-DEF

There are lots of different nouns to handle the different nuances: mo|zaj: front
is used for "in front of", "before", gilvon: top for "on", "above", etc... as
well as a few others which don't follow the general scheme because of their
meaning (for instance: kep: accompaniement is used with the prefix ko-: means to
make the postposition kokef: with. Segabi: opposition, makes kosegabi: in spite
(of)).

Christophe.

http://rainbow.conlang.free.fr