right size of preposition inventory?
Posted: 27 Jun 2023 22:37
I've hit a snag in my conlang, and was wondering if anyone could chime in.
I'm deciding on prepositions for my conlang, "Yeh" . So far I have 11. Here's what I have so far: https://rentry.co/hq8af
I want to avoid relexing English. To prevent that, I'm trying to divide the semantic space differently than English does. Additionally, I'm trying to keep the number of prepositions small. So in situations where English may have a dedicated adposition or case, Yeh would use a combination of a preposition and relational noun. (Example: "between" might be rendered as "at the middle of" in Yeh)
Here's the issue I'm having: I don't currently have a way to express comitative, benfactive, semblative or instrumental relationships with prepositions. I also don't want to include cases in the language. Yet I imagine these sorts of relationships would come up in speech frequently. So how unusual would it be, for a natural language, to have prepositions for a variety of spatial and temporal relationships, but leave these ones out?
And for languages that do exclude these relationships from adpositions or cases, how do they express these relationships? I have heard there is such a thing as a "comitative relational noun" but I'm having trouble finding examples of how that works, in practice.
My goal is not to be 100% natural, but I'd like to hit around 80% if I can. If you notice anything obviously artificial about what I have so far, please let me know.
Thank you in advance
I'm deciding on prepositions for my conlang, "Yeh" . So far I have 11. Here's what I have so far: https://rentry.co/hq8af
I want to avoid relexing English. To prevent that, I'm trying to divide the semantic space differently than English does. Additionally, I'm trying to keep the number of prepositions small. So in situations where English may have a dedicated adposition or case, Yeh would use a combination of a preposition and relational noun. (Example: "between" might be rendered as "at the middle of" in Yeh)
Here's the issue I'm having: I don't currently have a way to express comitative, benfactive, semblative or instrumental relationships with prepositions. I also don't want to include cases in the language. Yet I imagine these sorts of relationships would come up in speech frequently. So how unusual would it be, for a natural language, to have prepositions for a variety of spatial and temporal relationships, but leave these ones out?
And for languages that do exclude these relationships from adpositions or cases, how do they express these relationships? I have heard there is such a thing as a "comitative relational noun" but I'm having trouble finding examples of how that works, in practice.
My goal is not to be 100% natural, but I'd like to hit around 80% if I can. If you notice anything obviously artificial about what I have so far, please let me know.
Thank you in advance