Re: names for cases

Hallo!

On Tue, 28 Mar 2006 08:05:25 +0200, Benct Philip Jonsson wrote:

> Yeah, I'll end up with a *lot* of cases for different motions and
> locations.  I'm probably better off having noun roots for "top, inside,
> underside, outside, backside" etc. and construct them with simple
> spatial cases + genitive (or dative?[1]) of the main noun, which
> then develop to postpositions in the daughter langs.  After all
> there should be *some* adpositions!
This is also in essence how this works in Old Albic.  The prepositions
of this language are inanimate nouns with the object of the preposition
in the locative case (the usual case for an inalienable possessor).
These relational nouns may themselves take case endings:

hanthas amas mbaras
front-LOC the-LOC house-LOC
'before the house'

hanthan amas mbaras
front-ALL the-LOC house-LOC
'to before the house'

hanthad amas mbaras
front-ABL the-LOC house-LOC
'from before the house'

But there is something funky already going on in Old Albic, which explodes
into full glory in one of the daughter languages, Macaronesian.  In Old Albic,
there is an alternative way to express inalienable possession used with
pronouns and indefinite nouns without attributes: compounding.  The possessor
is prefixed to the possessum, as in _marath_ 'my head'.  This can, in
principle, also be done with prepositions; in Macaronesian, such compounds
were reanalysed as case forms, resulting in a Daghestanian-style system
with dozens of cases.

Greetings,

Jörg.