Re: Semantic field for local cases

On Fri, 2 Jun 2006 10:52:08 +0200, Jean-François Colson
<fa597525@...> wrote:

>Hello Harold,
>
>Your system sounds interesting.
Thank you.

>I've designed a writing system for a language with
>only monosyllabic and bisyllabic words, where the
>monosyllabic words will be a regular contraction of some
>bisyllabic ones.
>The meaning of the words will be carried by the consonants
>and the relations between the words, i.e. the cases,
>by the vowels. There are 36 (9*4) vowels, so there
>are 1296 POSSIBLE cases, but I could drop a few vowels
>in the future if they seem useless.
I doubt that I could pronounce 36 vowels. That is quite
a few (and even Ankanian with its 13 vowel sounds probably
exceeds the natural language average). Though if you are
also including duration in the count, that would leave
18 different vowels which might be feasible.

Of course, with 1296 possibilities, it would be overkill
to restrict these to only case forms. It seems that the
entire grammar could be accomplished with these variations.

>You wrote:
>
>[...]
>> -are nominative-inessive (inessive)------------in
>[...]
>> -ere genitive-inessive (elative)---------------out from
>[...]
>> -oe dative-inessive (illative)-----------------into
>[...]
>> -aue instrumental-inessive---------------------through
>[...]
>
>How do you translate the preposition "out"?
>The elative case implies a movement from the inside
>of the object. But out do you say "out (from)"
>without any movement?
Ankanian has positional nouns like:
tola=region above
nela=region below
pöla=region ahead
mula=region behind
nala=region outside
etc.....

As in many natural languages these relate to an object
which is in the genitive. Ex: tola dameu=region above a house
Though in Ankanian they are typically compounded (which
implies a genitive relation):
toldama=region above a house (lit. the above-region of a house)

Positional nominatives also can behave as adverbs thus:
toldama=above a house
naldama=ouside of a house

Harold