Talk:Instructive case

Latest comment: 2 years ago by SyntaxW02TheThird in topic Overlap with instrumental case article

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As a fin myself, I must say that "omin silmin" means "with my own eyes" and not "with one's own eyes". The latter one would be translated to Finnish like "omilla silmillään".

Overlap with instrumental case article

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Comparing this article to that of the instrumental case reveals an extraordinary degree of overlap. The Finnish section on that article mentions the obsolescent instructive case (yes, they even use the same word) taking the form outlined here on this article, as well as the fact that it's been largely supplanted by the adessive case (also mentioned here). Similarly, the Turkish section on the instrumental case article is overall just a more detailed version of what's written here. Only Estonian is completely absent from the other article.

Looking at an earlier edition of Karlsson 2018 from the "Further reading" section, there is some highly crucial information missing from this article. Per Karlsson, "The instructive ending is ‑n and it expresses manner, means, instrument, location or time. In nominals it occurs almost exclusively in fixed plural expressions which also have an adjective or a pronoun as premodifier." This explanation seems like it could be enough to set the instructive apart from the instrumental, but it's nowhere to be found in this article! At present there is far too much information missing from this article that could sufficiently explain the difference between instructive and instrumental — having them both be explained as "by means of" with no further detail about the difference in nuances is clearly not enough. At the same time, though, it's extremely difficult to find online sources in English that even allude to an "instructive case" at all, which makes expanding this article from anywhere other than Karlsson quite difficult. It's worth noting also that Anhava 2015, the other source cited in the "Further reading" section, mentions the instructive case only twice, and does so in a way that assumes the reader already knows what this means, without any further explanation. At best this source could be cited for a future sentence about instructive constructions developing into other morphemes once/if the article is expanded, otherwise its relevance to this article seems minimal.

Going back now to Karlsson, the explanation given there does not seem to apply to Turkish in the same way, and as mentioned before, the instrumental case article already fleshes out the Turkish equivalent much more than this article does. In the absence of sources already cited here, and seeing as I have yet to find a reliable source referring to the Turkish -le/-la particle as "instructive" rather than "instrumental", I am strongly considering deleting it, but I would like to have some input from others first before doing so, since there might be sources in languages that I do not speak which could confirm that Turkish belongs here and not on instrumental case. Overall, I am requesting some help to clean up this article as well as instrumental case, to ensure that the languages — and just in general, facts — mentioned in this article are truly specific to instructive case and not just a duplicate of information about the instrumental case. SyntaxW02TheThird (talk) 07:32, 29 July 2022 (UTC)Reply