[Lingtyp] terminological question about local cases/adpositions

[Jess Tauber]

Yahgan (genetic isolate, Tierra del Fuego, now critically endangered (1
elderly speaker remaining) had a system of spatial/locational terms that I
hadn't thought of as case-like until reading the earlier posts here. i:la
'position outside/southward', i:lu: 'direction outside/southward'; inna
'position up/westward'., i:nu: 'direction up/westward'; i:ta 'position
eastward/down', i:tu: 'direction east/down', and so on. These roots can
then be extensively derived and also incorporate nominal elements following
the.  root. But normal object case forms are suffixed to the referent,
including simple locative -n, ablative -(n)daul(um) and allative -u:pai. So
was this larger geographically-based system a case system in development at
the time of European contact, or something else? A separate system using
non-cognate morphemes was prefixed to verbs to indicate direction.

Jess Tauber

On Wed, Mar 24, 2021 at 11:20 AM Christian Lehmann <
christian.lehmann at uni-erfurt.de> wrote:

> Am 24.03.21 um 16:09 schrieb Greville Corbett:
>
> One solution is to use the Latin APUD, SUB, SUPER and so on, where APUD
> generalises over apud-essive and apud-lative, and so on. I believe that was
> done by Aleksandr Kibrik (sorry I can’t find the right source at present).
> Compare Daniel & Ganenkov in their chapter on case marking in Dagestanian
> languages in the *Handbook of Case* (Malchukov & Spencer). This extracts
> the first part of your pairs of terms, and it gives enough distance to
> avoid the English problem.
> Very best, Grev
>
>
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> I do use these in the morphological glosses. I remain hesitant about the
> stylistic beauty of using them as designations of (values of) a grammatical
> category in the running text. However, being no native speaker, I will give
> way to competent intuition.
> --
>
> Prof. em. Dr. Christian Lehmann
> Rudolfstr. 4
> 99092 Erfurt
> Deutschland
> Tel.: +49/361/2113417
> E-Post: christianw_lehmann at arcor.de
> Web: https://www.christianlehmann.eu
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