John Berry:
>Without taking sides on the creole/non-creole issue, and bearing in mind
>that my knowledge of Japanese is 20 years old:
Hontoo desu ka? Demo hanashimashoo!
>Nominative: -wa, -ga
>Accusative: -o, -ga Genitive: -no
>Dative (or essive): -ni, or -te (they do it FOR me)
>Ablative: -de or -e
>Locative: -ni (at, or in) (literary form -ni te)
> or -e (to a place)(similar to Finnish essive?)
>Instrumental: -de
Yes, I've noticed that they could be understood as "suffixes".
However, they appear to be consistently pronounced as seperate
from the preceding noun.
That is, there is still a clear line that can be drawn between
the noun in question and any trailing postpositions like those
above. This is not so in other languages where we speak of
bonified case suffixes. PIE for one did not have those fine
lines like Japanese. For example, the nom.pl. of *ekwos was
*ekwo:s. (Having two vowels in succession in IE was a
phonotactical faux-pas.) Similar blurring occurs in languages
like Finnish (eg: nominative /mina"/ "I" vs genitive /minun/
"mine").
- gLeN
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