Re: Cases and adpositions

Nihil Sum <nihilsum@...> writes:

> David Peterson wrote:
>
> >Noun Cases:
> >1.) Nominative: --: 2kk2 (hand)
> ...
> >55.) Distributive*: -zFr, 2kk2jzer (each hand separately)
>
> Yeah, I think you're exploring that grey area between the case and the
> adposition / suffix. I don't think you should have proper "names" for all of
> them the way you do though. What if you use a suffix, or agglutinate a local
> noun, meaning "left of..." have you created number 56, the Sinisteressive?
Don't you feel a tendency to label everything in your language,
just to legitimize it? It might be impossible to resist. I know. :)
My Senu Yivokuchi doesn't have many cases (genitive/ablative,
dative/allative, commitative and essive) but I also have a number
of inflections that I hesitate on naming, like this
"sinisteressive". There's a class of nouns (mostly body parts)
that have a three-way marking system like this:

    tichen  'both hands'
    viechen 'left hand'
    jichen  'right hand'

On the adposition issue... I'm trying to have as few as
possible, so I'm resorting to nouns, as I understand
Japanese often does (cf. _tame_, _naka_, etc.). For
example:

    guro more nekhide
    ALLATIVE-purpose things happening-COPULA
    'for things to happen' / 'to make things happen'

Locative and some temporal expressions have corresponding
nouns this way. Of course, it's a matter of terminology
whether you call these nouns, which are heavily restricted
in usage, real nouns or simply prepositions with a lineage.


--Pablo Flores
  http://www.angelfire.com/ego/pdf/ng/index.html