Re: Language Sketch: Yargish Orkish
| From: | Elliott Lash <al260@...> |
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| Date: | Friday, August 16, 2002, 0:29 |
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trwier@UCHICAGO.EDU writes:
> > POSTPOSITIONS
> >
> > Yargish has a largish number of postpositions, that combines with the
> > ergative, dative and locative cases. For spatial postpositions, the
> > ergative carries ablative meaning, the dative allative and the locative,
> > um, locative meaning. Taking _dir_ "forest" and _-zata_ "in, inside",
> > we then have:
>
> It's a little unusual that the ergative would carry that oblique
> spatial meaing, but possible if phonological sound changes collapsed
> two originally distinct cases. Is this the case in Yargish?
Why? In my book on case: CASE Second Edition by Barry J. Blake (a Cambridge
Textbook in Linguistics), he gives many examples showing ergative in locative,
ablative, instrumental and genitive functions. Of course, ablative and
instrumental seem to be the most common secondary functions of the ergative,
but, I dont see why it's "unusual" to be locative instead.
Elliott Lash.
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