Re: Case

[Padraic Brown <pbrown@POLARIS.UMUC.EDU>]

On Thu, 15 Jul 1999, Ed Heil wrote:
>
> All this is IMHO. :)

Of course!  All of this is "in our opinion".

The list has hashed this issue out before, not too long ago I recall.
Rearguing the points doesn't do any good, because we'll end up saying more
or less the same things.  To bring it back to conlanging a bit, it does
remind me somewhat of the (at times heated) debate among Kemrese academia
over whether Kernu actually has three or four cases (the genitive being in
dispute, sometimes to the point of dismissing a teacher for espousing the
wrong viewpoint). They also argue over the origins and utility of the
compound verb tenses; but not too loudly. It's all nearly as bad as the
furor caused a century ago by one philologist and his followers who
claimed that Kernu ought to classed as a "language" and not a (bastard)
"dialect" of Brithenig, the legal status at the time.  Course, he _would_
have to win in the end! :) Which only served to open several new cans of
worms, like "now that it's a language, what do we do with it?" The 1900s
and 1910s were Interesting Times, linguistically speaking.

Padraic.