[Multilingual Monday] There and Back

[aadroma]

One of the things I find most fascinating about a language like Finnish is the near lack of prepositions as we know them, as nouns are conjugated into locative "cases". Take talo, "house." "In a house" becomes talossa; taloksi is "to a house", and several cases cover such concepts that would be covered in English as "from", "with", "without", etc

Comments

[muckefuck]

English doesn't have locative cases as such, but it still has peculiarities in its locative expressions. It's not normal for count-nouns to be used without articles in the singular ("I like book" is Tarzan-talk), but we make a few exceptions, e.g. "I'm going to school", "See you in town". British English allows noticeably more, e.g. "Where do you go to university?" "She's going in hospital next Tuesday."

[oddcellist]

I'd be interested to see what Finnish does with the names of towns. In Hungarian, towns and countries outside of Hungary take the illative/inessive/elative-Németországba, Berlinbe; Németországban, Berlinben; Németországból, Berlinből.

Hungary itself, though, and some (but not all!) towns in Hungary take the sublative/superessive/delative-so Miskolcra, Budapestre; Miskolcon, Budapesten; Miskolcról, Budapestről. (Budapest and Németország both behave as compound nouns for the purposes of vowel harmony.) But you also have Sopronban, Debrecenben etc. (Curiously, Google seems to throw up some variance on the matter of Bécs 'Vienna,' though this may be my personal failure to interpret the results rather than true indecision on the part of speakers. Wikipedia says Bécsben, though.)

Latin and Ancient Greek both have residual locatives-Latin with "cities, towns, and small islands," though you only really see it in the first declension, and Ancient Greek preserves an old locative particularly in oíkoi 'at home.' As for indicating direction,

[gullinbursti]

Esperanto gives you the option to express "motion toward" using the accusative, either with an adverbial form or using a noun -- either "Mi iras al Parizo" (I go+present-tense to Paris-nominative) or "Mi iras Parizon" (I go+present-tense Paris-acc.) With the adverb, you can say either "Mi iras al mia hejmo" (I go+present-tense to my home+noun) or "Mi iras hejmen" (I go home+adverb+acc.) The adverbial form actually sounds more natural to me, while "Mi iras Parizen" sounds odd, though technically correct. I'm not sure why.

[muckefuck]

Hejmen is bizarre to me. Why should an adverb take a nominal inflection?