wales@ucla-cs.UUCP (11/09/85)
Actually, I believe most of the so-called "cases" in the Ural-Altaic languages are in fact simply the end product of an evolutionary process in which commonly used postpositions became suffixes. Most of these languages (at least Hungarian, Finnish, and Estonian) use postpositions almost exclusively. This is in contrast, of course, to English (the only common English postposition I can think of is "ago"). In the earliest known Hungarian documents from the Middle Ages, there were only a handful of "cases". Most of the modern spatial-relationship "cases" were still represented by multi-word postpositional phrases; for instance, "a ha'z bele'n" = "a" (the) + "ha'z" (house) + "bel" (inside part) + "-e" (his/her/its) + "-n" (locative case) = "at the interior of the house". (Hungarian has no true genitive case, and uses either the nominative or dative depending on context and style.) The postpositions eventually coalesced onto the ends of the nouns, and (no doubt driven on by Hungarian's initial-syllable stress accent) took on the vowel-harmony characteristics of the nouns. Thus, we get the modern form "a ha'zban" = "a" + "ha'z" + "-ban" (inside of). The end result of this process is the mile-long list of "cases" we see today -- some with up to four forms, owing to vowel harmony (which in Hungarian includes some degree of rounded/unrounded alternation as well as front/ back alternation). I am not very familiar with Finnish, but the large number of postpo- sitions in modern Finnish which govern a noun in the genitive case very strongly suggests that a similar process took place there as well. The "case" theory of Uralic languages is a legacy of European linguists steeped in the Latin/Greek model, and really does not adequately explain what is going on in this non-Indo-European language family at all. -- Rich Wales // UCLA Computer Science Department // +1 213-825-5683 3531 Boelter Hall // Los Angeles, California 90024 // USA ARPA: wales@LOCUS.UCLA.EDU -or- wales@UCLA-LOCUS.ARPA UUCP: ...!(ucbvax,ihnp4)!ucla-cs!wales
gadfly@ihuxn.UUCP (Gadfly) (11/12/85)
-- > Most of these languages (at least Hungarian, Finnish, and Estonian) use > postpositions almost exclusively. This is in contrast, of course, to > English (the only common English postposition I can think of is "ago"). Try "galore." -- *** *** JE MAINTIENDRAI ***** ***** ****** ****** 12 Nov 85 [22 Brumaire An CXCIV] ken perlow ***** ***** (312)979-7753 ** ** ** ** ..ihnp4!iwsl8!ken *** ***