[Tlhingan-hol] Noun cases

[David Trimboli]

On 11/28/2011 5:22 PM, André Müller wrote:
> 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.

True, but it was the fact that genitive nouns (usually) block other
cases that made me suppose that it was a special case of its own. See my
next comment on -'e' below.

> 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".

If we consider "topic/focus" *not* to be a case, and because there are
no known instances of declined nouns as subject or object, my special
case for genitive need not exist. It is as you say: call it an unmarked
nominative case, which would also prevent any other declination (because
then it wouldn't be the unmarked nominative).

Then the only inconsistency is that Okrand calls -'e' a syntactic
marker, where it's not really indicating syntactic function, and nouns
with -'e' may never be marked for case. Unless sticking a noun + -'e' in
the "header" as a topic makes it act as a case...

> 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.

choQaHbejpu'.

-- 
David Trimboli
http://www.trimboli.name/