Re: Case's Name

On Sun, 7 Aug 2005 17:51:58 +0300, John Vertical <johnvertical@...>
wrote:

>>Max wrote:
>>
>> > For Vbazi, to find a way to express meanings like "orange juice",  >
>>"milk coffee", or "apple pie", I've invented a preposition that is a  >
>>"preposition of composition" that works like "juice PREP orange" and  >
>>"coffee PREP milk".
>>
>>You realize you have three different types of relations there:
>>
>>(1) orange juice is juice comprised entirely of oranges
>>(2) milk coffee is coffee with milk added
>>(3) apple pie is something that prominently features (but does not
>>entirely consist of) apples
>>
>>I think it would be strange to have one preposition to do all three
>>of these.  If you flip it and make "juice orange" and "pie apple", then
>>you'd get something very much like French à, wouldn't you?
>
>Seconded.
>
>It seems to me that (2) is most likely to receive a different structure than
>the others. "Coffee" is a well-defined dish all by itself, but "juice" and
>"pie" are not. You can have "plain coffee", but not "plain juice" or "plain
>pie"; no, it's always orange, papaya, etc juice. Likewise, altho you *could*
>theoretically bake an empty pie crust and call it "plain pie", it's
>practically always "something pie" - be it apple, kidney, or
>crowberry-bogblueberry.
I think it's quite naturalistic to have the same preposition express (1),
(2), and (3).  Sure, the precise relation is different in each case, but as
you note they all relate to 'composition'~'containment as an ingredient'.
And anyway, prepositions in natlangs tend to have broad and idiosyncratic
semantic ranges.

If you're worried about the similarity to French à, then I would just choose
some preposition to express this sense of composition whose basic meaning is
not shared with à.  I also like John's suggestion of the comitative:

[...]
>Rechecking the Vbazi grammar, I see that you already have a comitative, tho
>as a verbalizer; but that would be one solution anyway. "Coffee
>is-together-with-milk" sounds neat enough to me.
to which I'd add that "juice is-together-with-orange" sounds just as neat,
if a bit more idiomatic.

Alex

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