Re: Prepositions and case

----- Original Message -----
From: "R A Brown" <ray@...>
To: <CONLANG@...>
Sent: Monday, March 24, 2008 3:27 PM
Subject: Re: Prepositions and case


[...]

>> Morphologically speaking, the case merges wth the accusative (and
>> thence subsequently with the nominative), so would any
>> ablative-governing preposition stay as it was and become accusative
>> by default,
>
> Yes, they did, in fact.
>
>> or would a speaker feel that that felt wrong, that it
>> needed an indirect case, and shift it to the Dative?
>
> A speaker of the Classical language would not lose the ablative. S/he
> would most certainly feel using the dative (singular) to be wrong. A
> speaker of the  colloquial language had no problem: there was no
> ablative and all prepositions governed the accusative.
[...]

> If Peter is constructing one of those conlangs
> that, because of some quirk in an alternative history, derived from
> _Classical_ Latin
[...]

> It is noteworthy that modern Romance forms derived from a conflation
> from dative and ablative, i.e. third person pronouns in them all, nouns
> generally in Romanian, while the singular is derived from the ancient
> dative, the plural is invariably derived from ancient genitive forms.
>
> --
> Ray

The language is VL based.  Ablatve forms do merge with the accusative, and
so logic (and OTL fact) moves all the prepositions over to governing the
accusative. BUT, and this is where the grain of doubt enters my mind:

~ The Romance languages lose case disitnction generally, and quite early
on -  my Romconlang does not.

~ In (very) Old French at least there is only a Nom/Oblique dsitinction (I'm
not familiar enough with the history of the other natangs to cite here), so
the prepositions could be said to govern the oblique case, rather than the
acccusative. Either way, the preopositions do not govern *nominatives* - but
IMC the accusative has merged with the nominative and there is only a
Nom/Gen/Dat distinction.

~ The pre-Roman substrate in the region uses the Dative also for indirect
objects, and in situations where (Classical) Latin uses/used the Ablative.

So I have poor old Octavio who is confused, because his teacher is telling
him his writing is inaccurate because such and such a preposition governs
some 'ablative' case he has no practical concept of (other than it sometimes
seems a bit like the dative, which he uses a lot), whereas in the same
circumstance that Gaulish guy on the market stall is using what sounds to
Octavio like the nominative, but his Chattian grandfather, who quite frankly
doesn't speak Roman so well anyway (and whom they say has never been right
in the head since one of Varus' lot nearly did for him 50 years back at
Teutoberg) keeps cuffing him around the ear, muttering "it's under*me*, not
under *I*, ignorant boy," or something like that.


Peter.

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