Has emergence of case system ever been observed?

By: | Post date: 2016-03-23 | Comments: No Comments
Posted in categories: Linguistics, Other Languages

Though it doesn’t look like Indo-European case,  serial verb constructions have ended up turning into case markers. An instance is Chinese ba, which is primarily the verb “take”, but which has started to act like an accusative marker: “I take spear look” > “I ACC spear look”, I pick up the spear to look at it > I look at the spear.
Answered 2016-03-23
[Originally posted on http://quora.com/Has-emergence-of-case-system-ever-been-observed/answer/Nick-Nicholas-5]

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