[Tlhingan-hol] Noun cases

[André Müller]

I tried the exact same thing about two weeks ago when I wrote my
presentation for a linguistic students' conference. I chose the obvious
names locative, ablative, causal and dative as well. I didn't want to
postulate a genitive case, as it's quite common in the (natural) languages
of the world to have possession and modification marked by plain
juxtaposition without any case marking, but it's rather uncommon to call
this bare noun stem a case and give it a name. Rather, one would assume
that the nominative takes over the function of the possessor marker as
well. Otherwise you'd have two cases with the same (zero) marking, namely
genitive and nominative, the latter of which you might want to mention too.

Why not lative? Well, that's just a matter of taste. Case names are usually
not exhaustive descriptions of all their functions. Otherwise, the -vaD
suffix should be called dative/benefactive (and maybe more). I prefer to
give cases single names and describe their function later. "Locative" seems
to be the most common or basic function of the -Daq suffix.
But you're of course free to call it a locative-lative case. Some
linguistics do prefer double-names for cases.

About -'e': I also wondered if it's rectified to call it a "case". I'm not
sure what the answer should be. But it might just be a question of
terminology. It's not very important for the description of the grammar.
More important is the role the suffix plays. Judging from the uses it has,
it's both a "topic marker", as well as a "focus marker", if I'm not
mistaken. Not sure if topic and focus can be called cases (actually, I
started that Wikipedia list of grammatical cases years ago with a friend),
but I can't think of any term to describe both functions. So here at least
I would call it "topic/focus".

Any cases you have missed: only the unmarked nominative case. I think it's
alright to name it "nominative" even though there is no accusative in
Klingon. But it's not necessary to gloss it seperately or assume a
null-morpheme there.

Greetings,
- André

2011/11/28 David Trimboli <david at trimboli.name>

> I was listing the noun cases of Klingon, and I can't find all the
> terminology I want.
>
> So far I have the following list:
>
> locative/lative (-Daq)
> ablative (-vo')
> causal (-mo')
> dative (-vaD)
> genitive (-)
>
> I postulate the existence of a "null case" for genitive because when a
> noun acts in a genitive fashion (the first noun of a noun-noun
> construction), it cannot decline into another case.
>
> I'm stuck on -'e', though. Looking through Wikipedia's list of grammatical
> cases <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/**List_of_grammatical_cases<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_grammatical_cases>>
> I cannot find anything that obviously refers to the function seen by the
> "subject" of a to-be construction, or by the {SuvwI''e'} in {qIbDaq
> SuvwI''e' SoH Dun law' Hoch Dun puS} in Star Trek V. Does anybody know
> whether linguists have a name for this topic case?
>
> Is there a case that combines the functions of locative (in/on/at) and
> lative (to, into)?
>
> Have I missed any other cases that aren't type 5 noun suffixes?
>
> --
> SuStel
> http://www.trimboli.name/
>
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