The case governed by locational relationals

cþC19 (2021-10-05)

When this entry is written, relationals that show location, such as ⟨es⟩ inside or ⟨desa⟩ below govern the dative case:

(1)

nôra serin tfeldarnirþ ginas desa doaŋaras lerþil eleþes mâroþ.

nôr-a
small-rel.nom,nom.cel

ser-in
seed-nom.pl

tfeldarn-irþ
endure-ser

gin-as
snow-dat.sg

desa
under

do-aŋar-as
caus-warm-rel.nom,dat.cel

lerþ-il
spring-gen.sg

eleþ-es
sun-dat.sg

mâr-o-þ.
wait-3pl-past

The little seeds waited patiently under the snow for the warm spring sun.

In ŊCv7, on the other hand, such relationals governed the locative case.

I have been noticing that the locative case is not used much in ŊCv9. This trend is especially unsettling since the locative forms of nouns tend to have interesting stem changes. To verify this hypothesis, I used the following Bash command to find mentions of each case in glosses in the Pollen markup files: for c in nom acc dat gen loc inst abess sembl; do echo -n "$c: "; grep -E "%$c\\b" src/texts/<file name>.html.pm | wc -l; done

Case	CSTC (#1 – #67)	Zaslon	Moyashi
Nominative	44	19	21
Accusative	18	49	45
Dative	22	16	9
Genitive	12	16	3
Locative	14	9	1
Instrumental	5	0	0
Abessive	0	0	0
Semblative	0	0	0

Table 1: The number of times each case was mentioned in glosses of various sentence sets. These count any mention of a case in glosses, such as in declined nouns and in infinitive particles.

Note the difference between the CSTC and the apple sentence sets: in the latter, the subject in many sentences is pronominal, such that most of the Ŋarâþ Crîþ translations lack an explicit subject. On the other hand, many sentences in the CSTC have non-pronominal subjects, so the nominative case is used more often in these sentences.

Still deciding whether to align ŊCv9 behavior with ŊCv7 in this respect.