Prepostions and Case

Since the discussion of prepostions in English grammar is often an afterthought, it may seem strange to talk about them now before I get to nouns. The fact is that after years of thinking they'd pretty much take care of themselves, I decided to take a more systematic approach to prepositions and discovered that as words that are used very frequently they should be given serious thought.

Case comes into play here because, nominal cases can eliminate the need for some prepositions and help decide how the rest connect to sentences.

For speakers of languages like English, French and Spanish, nominal cases might seem like an unnecessary complication. Indeed, I would suggest that if you don't very well know any natural languages with an extensive case system you do not attempt to introduce case into your constructed language. If you wish to introduce object case versions of the pronouns (which each of the languages I mentioned in this paragraph have) you won't have any trouble and now is the time to do it. But a full blown case system is a very different matter.

My first graduate school roommate studied Classical Literature. I very well remember him struggling to understand his Latin translation assignments, and saying what a breeze his Ancient Greek readings were by comparison. I had a similar experience with different languages. It was easy enough to use the cases of German, but since the cases of German have very much fallen together and are sometimes barely distinguishable, reading the complex formal German of the late 19th and early 20th century was often a headache. By comparison the more extensive case system of Russian, which I learned a little later, was a breeze; easy to use, easy and even fun to read.

The use of case can free up word order and make for interesting stylistics. But those stylistic twists can either be a headache for the learner like in Latin or a joy as in many of the Slavic languages. The difference is in how easy it is to recognize the case of words at a glance. If you are going to use case, limit the number of noun classes you use(and if you don't know what that means you are probably not ready to be using your own case system). Then make each of the case endings distinct. Don't fall into the temptation of using the same endings for different cases as you may find in the natural languages you know. The natural languages have had thousands of years to develop and even then, some of the results aren't as happy as we'd like. Most of all remember that the first and perhaps only person who will learn your language is you. If you write something down one month and then can't make sense of it the next, there will be no one else to help you out.

How many cases you should use is up to you. Personally I think, a four case system, as in German or modern Greek, is something of a waste. You introduce much of the complexity without getting all the benefits of having a case system. On the other hand having 16 cases like Finnish is said to have, is most probably excessive. I would say that if you are familar with Latin or one of the Slavic languages with lots of cases, you should feel free to adjust the number of cases up or down to fit your imagination and needs.

Getting back to prepostions, if you are using cases, you will need to decide which cases go with which prepostions. Simply copying this from some language you already know will certainly work, but it does beg the question of whether you are making up a language or simply encoding the one you knew. Not everything you do in your language has to be new and different. But to make it worth all the effort, some things ought to be changed or improved just to make yourself happier with your end product.

The grammatical function which prepostions fill, does not necessarily have to be performed by words in front of noun phrases. In English we can readily understand the sentence Who are you going with?. Teachers of English who've been taught to think rigidly in terms of Latin grammar (whether they've been taught so much as a word of Latin or not) violently object to this kind of construction, saying it's ungrammatical. The truth is they don't understand grammar the same way a linguist does. It's not ungrammatical, it's just a construction totally alien to Latin! There is no reason the things we call prepostions could not be placed after the noun phrases and be called, say, 'postpositions!'

The plane sailed the sky through.
The woman signed the letter her pen with.

We can puzzle these sentences out. Though for sanity's sake having the words 'sky' and 'pen' above in a case relating the noun to the 'postposition' instead of the verb would be a giant help as sentences became more complex!

Personally, I didn't do anything so daring with my own language. I have a complete set of case endings (eight, including the Russian cases plus vocative and ablative) which I can use with my langauge. However I do not currently use them and don't intend to use them ever. In fact I do not even use object forms of prepositions. I do use a genitive case for nouns to avoid the chains of 'of phrases' I kept running into when I was learning Spanish. ...de la casa del hermano de Maria... I have a preposition for 'of' to use for stylistic variety, and indeed it is tempting to use it just as in English.

I made things a little more interesting by coming up with the concept of parallel prepostions. Those who know Russian know the verbal prefixes and prepostions that go together to make a set for talking about coming and going. I chose to make up prepositions in sets for 'location, direction, and destination.' I have eight sets corresponding to - in, out, to, from, up, down, into and out of. (The rest of my prepostions do not fit in this scheme). While it has made things interesting, the simple concept has turned out to be complex in use. I won't get rid of it, but I would not recommend it for others to use.