mac@uvacs.UUCP (Alex Colvin) (11/13/85)
> >It [Finnish] also has 16 cases, give or take; 2 are almost entirely poetic. > > I am familiar with the case systems of many IndoEuropean languages > (8 seems to be the maximum), but 16 cases seems most outrageous! > If somebody has the time, I would be most interested to understand > how these cases are used. Do the other languages whose relatedness > to Finnish is established {Estonian, Hungarian} or suspected > {Turkish, Mongolian, Korean} have case inflectional systems their > bear any resemblance? There seems to be disagreement on the case systems of some languages. Surely there are Turkish, Hungarian, Finnish, and Korean speakers out there who can enlighten us. As for Mongolian, Khalkha dialect has eight cases: Nominative, Genitive, Dative-Locative, Ablative, Accusative, Instrumental, Comitative, Directive. Nom., Gen., Abl., Acc., Inst. are all as in IE languages. Dat.-Loc. has functions of both IE cases. Comitative has the sense of "together with X". Directive has the sense of "towards X" (as does the Acc. in many IE languages). Some authors mention the petrified cases Prolative ("along, on the surface of X"), and Terminative ("until X"). There are several combinations, (Gen.-Loc. "at X's place"), and reflexives (Inst. refl. "by one's X") I believe the record for declensions goes to the Caucasians, particularly Georgian. > > Lappish and, I believe, an AmerIndian language spoken by those who > once occupied the San Francisco bay area have also been linked to > the Finno-Ugric languages, BTW. Lappish is a Finno-Ugric language, or at least Uralic. The link to San Fransisco sounds highly speculative. sonin yuu wain? sonin yuumguai!