A question for cultural linguistics geeks
I've always struggled with the locative case. I mean I understand that a grammatical case involves distinct noun forms, and that this one refers specifically to location. But in English prepositional phrases are used to indicate location.
It's like the English language fetches things from somewhere 'out there' and puts them in place, while languages that use the locative case seem to structure the world so that things only ever exist in place.
Does this make sense?
It's like the English language fetches things from somewhere 'out there' and puts them in place, while languages that use the locative case seem to structure the world so that things only ever exist in place.
Does this make sense?
Labels: linguistics
2 Comments:
It makes perfect sense, in an intuitive sort of way. With locative case you make location an intrinsic property of the noun like gender. We actually sort of have a locative case in English. The word "home" as in "Beth is home.", "John went home." carries the sense of location without a preposition. It would make an interesting essay to explore all the reasons why this particular word is treated so differently. Also I wonder if there are any others in English or if there are other langages that treat 'home' so specially.
nicepost
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