Re: Marking case with articles

Matt Pearson wrote:

>On Sun, 21 Mar 1999, Gary Shannon wrote:
>
>> I'm still playing with the grammar one of my older conlangs
>> called Tazhi, and I was toying with the idea of dropping case
>> endings in favor of marking case and number with the article.
>>
>> Has anyone seen or used this approach before in any conlang or
>> natlang?
>
>
>Natlangs:  The Philippine languages (e.g. Tagalog) work quite a bit
>like this.  Perhaps Kristian Jensen can give some examples...
I definitely can (give *some* examples)! Sorry for the late reply
though. In Tagalog, articles, demonstratives, and pronouns all
indicate case and number. There are three cases which I'll call
trigger, oblique, and genitive. Here are some examples, (to be
viewed in a monospace font like courier):

                TRIGGER     OBLIQUE     GENITIVE
1SG             ako         akin        ko
1PL Incl        tayo        *           nayo
1PL Excl        kami        amin        namin
2SG             ikaw        iyo         mo
2PL             kayo        inyo        ninyo
3SG             siya        kaniya      niya
3PL             sila        kanila      nila
proper article  si          kay         ni
common article  ang         sa          ng
"this/here"     ito         dito        nito
"that/there"    yan         diyan       niyan
"yonder"        yun         doon        noon

My conlang, Boreanesian, works in a very similar fashion since it is
also a trigger language. The differences are:

-Only two cases in Boreanesian (Core, and Oblique).
-Two genders among Boreanesian determiners: animate, and inanimate.
Determiners are further subdivided into a bound phase and an unbound
phase. Determiners that are bound in phase are the demonstratives of
Boreanesian. But only a two degrees of distance (this/here,
that/there).

The thing I find appealing about having demonstratives marked for
only two cases is that the difference between "this" and "here"
becomes a difference in case ("this" core vs. "here" oblique).

-kristian- 8-)