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

----- Original Message -----
From: Danny Wier <dawier@...>
To: Multiple recipients of list CONLANG <CONLANG@...>
Sent: Wednesday, October 6, 1999 12:02 PM
Subject: Re: Ergative or Vocative?


> Nik wrote:
> > > Gen. of acc.    wetamaun    k@lumaun    [wetamaunw, k@lumaunw]
> >
> >What's "gen. of ace."?
>
> 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.

Examples (written in X-SAMPA):

den@laBa?a ?ada        The child's mother ('mother' is in the absolute case,
'child' is genitive)

 den@la    'child' - animate, singular, oblique case
 Ba?-      root for 'belong to'
 Ba?a      'one who belongs (to)' - animate, singular, absolute case
 ?ada      'mother' - animate, singular, absolute case

den@laBa?u qa:wu      The child's tooth ('tooth' abs., 'child' genitive)

 den@la and Ba?- as above
 Ba?u      'thing which belongs (to)' - inanimate, singular, absolute case
 qa:wu     'tooth' - inanimate, singular, absolute case

ja:muteja q_hina       The bird in the tree ('bird' abs., 'tree' locative)

 ja:mu     'tree' - inanimate, singular, oblique case
 tej-      root for 'to be with/in/at'
 teja      'one who is with/in/at' - animate, singular, absolute case
 q_hina     'bird' - animate, singular, absolute case

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?