Re: CHAT: Prepositions governing nominative, (X)... case [was Re: CHAT: Back on the list; Anti-conlanging bigots]

Thomas Weir wrote:
>
>Quoting Andreas Johansson <and_yo@...>:
>
> > Anton Sherwood wrote:
> > >"Thomas R. Wier" wrote:
> > > > one day we were discussing how GB handles case marking, and the
> > > > question arose whether there are any languages whose adpositions
> > > > assign nominative case.  I mentioned that I knew off the top of my
> > > > head of no natural languages which marked case in that way, though
> > > > I did know of a constructed language [Esperanto] that did this. . .
> > >um . . . remind me?
> >
> > Hmm, as some people on this list may be aware, Tairezazh and Steianzh
> > violate this rule by having prepositions followed by the nominative*.
> > Now, in Kalini Sapak the accusative is the most basic case (used as the
> > lexical form, as vocative etc). So, does this mean that it be unnatural
>to
> > have adpositions govern accusative?
>
>Generally speaking, no, but it really depends on the number
>of distinct cases in the language and what kinds of other uses they
>might have and how they uses interact with one another.  Is the
>accusative morphologically marked by <null>, while the nominative
>takes some special ending?  Such a system is not unheard of, though
>it is far rarer than special marking for the accusative and no marking
>for the nominative.
Well, Kalini have Semitoid base system, where the second vowel of a noun
showing case:

kazal "woman (ACC)"
kazul "woman (NOM)"
kazil "woman's" (pronounced [kaZil])

So arguably the nominative is no less or more marked than the accusative,
but hitherto, the nominative is only used for subjects and the genitive for
possession/association.

                                             Andreas

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