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Re: Prepositional phrases

From:Christophe Grandsire <christophe.grandsire@...>
Date:Monday, March 26, 2001, 9:50
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