Re: Combined Cases? and NP?

On Thursday, February 12, 2004, at 08:32 PM, Pavel Iosad wrote:

> Hello,
[snip]

> Could it be that you mean the old prepositionless locative which
> coincides with the genitive, as _Romae_ 'in Rome'?
Only in the singular of 1st & 2nd declension. With the 3rd declension,
the older usage had the locative identical to the dative, e.g. _ruri_
(in the country), but in the post-Augustan period this generally gave
way to using the ablative _rure_ (in the country). There was only one
4th declension noun still retaining a locative, namely: domi (at home);
no 5th declensions nouns are ever found with locative forms.  _All_
plural place names had locatives that were identical to the common plural
dative-ablative endings (the two cases were never distinguished in the
plural), e.g. Athenis (<-- Athenae).

> Or the
> accusative-as-allative, as in _eo rus(ACC)_ 'I'm going to the country'?
Which, I understand, is a usage inherited from PIE.
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On Thursday, February 12, 2004, at 08:55 PM, Christophe Grandsire wrote:

> En réponse à Carsten Becker :
>
>
>> Unfortunately, I can't. But I think I've read something like Latin has
>> sometimes accusative+genitive or so ...
>>
> Well, no. In Latin you just cannot add case endings onto each others.
Indeed you can't - no way, nohow!

> A single noun has a single case.
Yep.

> However, other languages can do that. Basque, for instance, has no
> problem combining cases together (one being usually one of the genitives)
> .
Yes, as soon as read accusative+genitive I thought of Basque  :)

[snip]
> Basque can do that because it is very agglutinative. Latin is a rather
> synthetic tongue and synthetic languages are usually quite strict in
> their declensions.
I agree on both accounts.

>>  I really don't know - that's why
>> I'm asking. If something like that really doesn't exist I'm sorry to have
>> posted a message that increases the count of the daily posting limit.
>
> Don't worry. Although it doesn't exist in Latin, other languages do show
> this feature (I found it so nice I immediately incorporated it in Moten.
> But since Moten uses infixes, suffixes and prefixes, it can make for
> strange things :)) ).
Great stuff!

> So it was a perfectly legitimate question :) .
Of course - you don't find out if you don't ask.

Ray
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