Re: Compound cases (was Re: Re: Ergative or Vocative?)

Eric C. wrote after me:

> > Genitive of accusative.  A case you'd find in languages like Basque
>(well,
> > really genitive of absolutive or ergative); they're referred to as
>'cases
>of
> > cases'.  (Tech case construction is a complex of internal inflections,
> > suffixes and prepositions, and many combinations.  There are
>'officially'
> > about ten cases, give or take, with a ton of locatives.)
>
>Interesting... reminds me of an idea I've had for Dhak. I've been thinking
>of just using two or three 'official' cases, with other cases made up of a
>word in an 'oblique' case plus a particle (in origin a noun) which itself
>is
>inflected to agree with the word it describes.
[...]

>As you can see, the oblique case is formed the same way as the absolute
>case. In fact, they may BE the same case. Does that make sense, or should I
>give them different markers?
Well, your oblique case could just be the stem for forming all the other
cases, if you use postpositions/suffixes consistenly for case marking.  And
you could have the absolutive and oblique have the same form for most nouns,
with certain nouns (especially the ones that would more likely be irregular,
especially pronouns) having a different oblique than absolutive.

How do you mark ergative by the way?

Danny

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