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Just to be pedantic, the Latin preposition in governs two cases: mostly the accusative as an expression of place whither or motion into, but also the ablative with time and expression of the place where. The latter is sometimes called the locative ablative. Latin had a locative case that it lost before it was a written language. Examples taken from Hale & Buck:
1. ut in Galliam venirent 'to come into Gaul' (acc. whither)
2. in puerita 'in boyhood' (abl time)
3. ter in anno 'twice a year' (abl time)
4. in silvis abditi latebant 'were lying hidden in the woods' (abl place where)
OTOH, ex simply governs the ablative case and is used to expressed 'out of'. The use of prepositions and the cases which they govern and how to translate them in English is quite a detailed and complicated affair and takes up a lot of time once one has learned the rather straightforward declensions and conjugations.
It is interesting to note that Old English, which had 4 cases, has both in and into both of which governed the dative. They expressed place in which and whither respectively. In OE, út was an adverb (as it is sometimes in German), and I have seen út of and út tó.
The question I've always pondered is: are cases slowly made obsolete by the use of more and more prepositions? or, as wsieber suggests, do prepositions come to be used more and cause the cases to wither away? Chicken or egg?
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are cases slowly made obsolete by the use of more and more prepositions? or, as wsieber suggests, do prepositions come to be used more and cause the cases to wither away? Chicken or egg?
Or do prepostions come in to fill the gap as cases wither away for other reasons?
Chicken, egg or nest?
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The question I've always pondered is: are cases slowly made obsolete by the use of more and more prepositions? or, as wsieber suggests, do prepositions come to be used more and cause the cases to wither away? Chicken or egg?
At the risk of continuing pedantry, nuncle, I'd suggest neither of these (similar?) options exactly describes the likely process...
When studying early English I was taught that the most likely cause of 'case fall' was the abrasion of two variants of language with otherwise many similar stem forms - eg, at the boundary areas contested by the NG tribes who settled either side of the Danelaw. This seems a convincing case to me ;) After all, if you encountered a stranger who used a word the main part of which you recognised as common with your language but with a weird suffix, the chances are you'd latch onto the former and be quite inclined to not register the latter, whilst she would do the same...
The common language would grow to be a simplified stem-base construction. Surely we see similar processes of language loan words getting adapted and simplified, and whole creoles sometimes emerging by similar concentration on the roots of the vocabulary?
If that process of language collision is the main driver of change, it would suggest that perhaps the prepositions get added after the fact, as an aid to greater clarity or sophistication. What thinkst thou?
edit:[/nest]
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The languages in contact theory sounds interesting, but if you go across the English Channel you find that the same thing happened across the board with the transition of Latin into Romance languages. (Latin's cases were probably falling together (phonoloigcally) in the Republic, and were still being written well past the fall in the west.) Another problem I have with this, is that we don't see the non-contact dialects preserving more cases than the contact variety. Since OE got interrupted (by William) during its attempted standardization (by Alfred's West Saxon court) by the introduction of the Norman variety of French, I guess we'll never know.
But, there is a theory of language change called accomodation theory (via Peter Trudgill) that says when two different language-speaking groups are trying to actually communicate, they accomodate their language towards each other, and that this accounts for some change. There's no doubt that the Vikings in the Danelaw affected English, but I think it's mainly in vocabulary (she and they are borrowed from the Norse) and not in case abandonment.
Anyway, just my tuppence. Cum grano salis. &c.
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IE languages have prepositions (actually they started as postpositions which can still be seen in Vedic Sanskrit). PIE is reconstructed with case. I've never seen a language that didn't have preps. Anyway, another idea is that since most languages have numerous elements of redundancy built in, it's not too tramatic for one of the redundant bits to go away or be replaced. Latin had cases, which as any Latin student is told, made word order optional. But spoken and prose Latin tended to have a default word order, and that word order became more fixed in the Romance languages when cases started to be confused with one another (for historical-phonological reasons). Could be the same with prepositions and cases. When cases collapse, the prepositions take on the meaning of the expression rather than spreading it across case plus preposition. It's just those cases (no pun) wherein case alone determined syntactic relations of nouns to verbs (e.g., dative for indirect object or accusative for direct object) that need to be grammaticalized. It's interesting that in English for indirect objects a prep was used (sometimes not always), but for the direct object word order filled in. The ablative absolute got replaced with conjunctions (when/while) plus the phrase. Anyway, not dogma just what I've thought over the years. And are you suggesting that the nest determined that chickens lay eggs? 
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I would have to say that this nest theory is but one way that the number of cases could decrease. I would suspect that similarity of case endings could cause separate cases to conflate formally. To some extent this is seen in classical Latin where, e.g., the first declension singular genitive and dative or second declension singular dative and ablative are formally identical. We know that the instrumental conflated with the ablative in all declensions in Latin as well as the locative falling into the ablative, as already noted.
I've also heard the theory that the prepositions were originally connected with the verb, as the separable and inseparable prefixes of German or the particle of phrasal verbs of English. Latin even has inseparable prefixes that generally look an awful lot like preposistions.
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I would suspect that similarity of case endings could cause separate cases to conflate formally.
I agree, Fong. But surely also far more likely for this process to be happening under the impetus of a driver for change, such as contact with another tongue?
Hm, I need some years to catch up on your thinking too, nuncle!
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Yes, Faldage, the whole preposition-preverb-particle nexus is intriguing but problematic. When does a preverb cease being associated with the verb and, becoming a preposition, come to be associated with a noun instead? Or become an adverb? Good fun mulling it over.
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I thought that I had come up with this Old Norse vs. Old English theory my ownself, but, on reflection, suspect that it was from Mario Pei. I've run into it most recently from someone, whose name I don't remember, in the BBC/PBS(?) series on the history of English
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When does a preverb cease being associated with the verb and, becoming a preposition, come to be associated with a noun instead?
Since neither we nor the Germans have felt that this is an exclusive or, I'd have to respectfully suggest that that is a wrong question.
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