Circumfixes?

Well my work on Tech is going great for once, after years of being stuck on
phonology and culture.  Borrowing mostly from Egyptian and Semitic, I'm coming
up with a crude grammar.  Features will include: prepositional case formation,
suffixal possessive and object pronouns, VSO word order (subject pronouns, used
only for emphasis, precede the verb), dual number, two types of plural (sound or
"small", and broken or "great"), adjectives following noun except for
demonstratives and numbers, adjectives agreeing with antecedents in number, case
and gender, direct genitive formation (the-noun the-adjective = the adjective
noun), and verbal nouns.

One of the features of the language will be the use of the "circumfix", which is
really the addition of a preposition to a noun bearing a case suffix (which are
used to indicate nominative, accusative/ergative and genitive, at least for
now).  This creates a "compound" case, and a change in the case ending changes
the meaning of the prepositional phrase.  So some possible local cases:

"at" + noun-nom = adessive "at, on"
"at" + noun-acc = allative "onto"
"at" + noun-gen = ablative "from"
"in" + noun-nom = inessive "in"
"in" + noun-acc = illative "into"
"in" + noun-gen = ellative "out of"

English does this too, just with compounded prepositions like "onto", "out of",
"upon".

Anybody else use circumfixes or circumpositions in their conlang, or a
dual-morpheme case marking system?

~DaW~


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