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Latin praepono to put or place before, to place first' is where the noun praepositio 'a setting before, prefixing' is derived from (its past particple praepositum). To augment what Faldage said: Sanskrit, Greek, and German exhibit a process called tmesis (literally 'a cutting' in Greek) where a verbal particle which is normally prefixed is separated in certain forms of the verb: e.g., German aufpassen 'to pay attention' yields pass(e) auf in the singular, informal imperative. Some languages have prepositions and others have postpositions. Some think that postpositions might eventually turn into inflectional case endings if given enough time.
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Some think that postpositions might eventually turn into inflectional case endings if given enough time.
I've heard something similar regarding the relation between prepositions and verb prefixes, separable or otherwise. Back in the good old days, when we had a full-up set of distinguishable case endings, we didn't need prepositions, but as the case endings started conflating we needed them to make ourselves understood.
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Back in the good old days, when we had a full-up set of distinguishable case endings, we didn't need prepositions, but as the case endings started conflating we needed them to make ourselves understood.
Yes, I've heard this, too. Only problem (I have with it) is that even heavily inflected languages have pre- or postpositions (governing certain cases). Also, it might be a chicken or an egg thang: do case endings fall into disuse because folks are using fixed word order and prepositions, or do they start using fixed word order and prepositions because of their case endings going away (because of some phonological changes).
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can you guys give some examples of what you're talking about? my knowledge of the jargon is pretty limited, and the vocab that's getting tossed around here is spinning me brain this morning... 
formerly known as etaoin...
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can you guys give some examples of what you're talking about?
Yeah, sure ... Take Latin. Nouns are declined for case and number. For every noun, you have upwards of 10 forms (for two numbers, singular and plural, and 5 cases, nominative, genitive, dative, accusative, and ablative). Here's a paradigm for two nouns:
NS :- puella 'girl'
GS :- puellæ 'of the girl, the girl's'
DS :- puellæ 'to / for the girl'
AS :- puellam 'the girl'
AbS :- puellâ 'with / by a girl'
NP :- puellæ 'the girls'
GP :- puellarum 'of the girls, the girls''
DP :- puellis 'to / for the girls'
AP :- puellas 'the girls'
AbP :- puellis 'with / by the girls'
(NB on the translations, Latin has no articles, either definite or indefinite, so you could say puella means 'girl, a girl, the girl'.)
So, that's what we mean by case endings (e.g., -a, -æ, -am, -arum, -is, and -as in this case). Case is used to show the syntactic relationship between a noun and another noun or a verb. For example, puer puellam amat means "The boy loves the girl". So does puellam amat puer, or any other combination of the three words. (Though note that some orders of the three words are more common than others.) Unlike say English or Chinese where word order shows the syntactic relationships between words in a sentence, in inflected languages (like Latin, Russian, or Sanskrit) it's the case endings. So, nominative is usually the (grammatical) subject of a sentence, accusative the direct object, and dative the indirect object. (NB, this is a simplsitic example. Cases have different meanings (when translated) and uses.)
So, what about prepositions? Latin had 'em. Take two of them: post 'behind' and prae 'before, in front of'. When post is used with a noun, the noun must be in the accusative case, and when præ is used, the noun must be in the ablative. This is what is meant by a preposition governs a certain case.
OK, let's bring in history. What happened to Latin when it changed, over the years, into Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Catalan, Provençal, French, Romanian, Sardinian, Friulan, et al.? Lots of stuff changed. But what we're interested in is case. Well, cases disappeared, and were basically replaced with word order. (NB: the same thing happened in English and Danish, but not in German. They are thought to be descended from a single Common Germanic which never got written down but probably existed back around the time of Latin or earlier.)
Not all grammatical categories disappeared: e.g., number stuck around and in verbs tense, person, etc. made it through. Let's look at the Spanish and Italian words for girl:
Italian
sg :- una / la ragazza 'a / the girl'
pl :- le ragazze 'the girls'
Spanish
sg :- una / la muchacha 'a / the girl'
pl :- las muchachas 'the girls'
Some stuff to notice: the lexemes (fancy word for word) have changed: puella, ragazza, and muchacha; the endings have changed, both the newer words end in -a but the plurals are different in Italian and Spanish; no more multiple cases like in Latin.
Now the question Faldage and I were mulling over is this. How / why did the changes occur? Or where did the cases go and why? As I said, it's not something that has to happen, see German and Russian, but it does, see English and Italian.
It is thought that spoken Latin, say in Cicero's time, was different from written Latin. The distinction between nom sg puella and acc sg puellam was disappearing. First the final m was reduced to nasalization of the preceding a, and finally it went away. Now nom and acc could be confused, but only if you used some weird word order rather than the one that was most common. (Even though, the common word order of latin SOV became Italian's common word order SVO; where S == subject, O == direct object, and V == verb. Now how did that happen?)
Anyway, eta, I think that's most of the jargon, but if you have any more questions please ask away ...
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thanks, jim. I think I'll print that out, so I can study it. as long as there won't be a test later...
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do case endings fall into disuse because folks are using fixed word order and prepositions, or do they start using fixed word order and prepositions because of their case endings going away
Probably it's a mixture of both forces at work.
For eta: If we had a unique case ending for the recipient of an action and another for the instrument used to accomplish something we could, for example, say "I hit manum swordo", "hit I swordo manum" or even "swordo hit manum I" or any other ordering of those words without needing any prepositions to indicate the the sword was the instrument and the man was the one hit by it. But if the dative -um ending and the instrumental -o ending, for whatever reason, became both pronounced the same, maybe -u, then some other method of distinguishing between the dative and the instrumental would be necessary. Maybe word order would do it and you could say "I hit manu swordu' or maybe you would use a preposition for one or both of the cases saying something like "hit I (with) swordu (at) manu" where you would use at least one of the prepositions.
Pipped by the master. But note: In Latin the instrumental and the ablative had already conflated, giving us what is normally called the ablative of means. Typically the instrumental took no preposition but any ablative use normally did take a preposition. In English it was the dative and instrumental that conflated.
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so we have more words for things, but the words are less specific. and this has to do with changes in pronunciation.
am I on the right track, or...
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Tahnks for a very interesting discussion, jheem and Fong. I was struck by the fact that Latin, like Hindi, has no articles. As I come to grip with postpositions, however, it seems that word order in Hindi DOES matter, despite nouns and adjectives being governed by case. The simplest example in my coursebook is this:
mez par qalam hai - table on pen is.
Which would be used to answer the question:
mez par kyaa hai? - What's on the table?
vs
qalam mez par hai - pen table on is.
Which would be used to answer the question:
qalam kahaaN hai? - Where's the pen?
This word order and use of (Hindi) postpositions can be seen very clearly in Hinglish as well.
Jheem, could the Hindi dependence on word order be connected to its having fewer distinguishing case markers than Latin?
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could the Hindi dependence on word order be connected to its having fewer distinguishing case markers than Latin?
As soon as you lose clarity in one method of indication of meaning you need something else to take over the job. Even Latin, with only five (or six if you count the vestigial vocative) cases needs prepositions to carry some of the load.
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