Re: Genitives and Possessive Adjectives

Hallo!

On Wed, 25 Feb 2004 15:30:20 +0000,
Chris Bates <christopher.bates@...> wrote:

> Do you think it would be workable to have a language which derived
> possessive adjectives instead of having a genitive? What I mean is...
> the latin genitive for instance, does not agree in gender or case with
> its noun, because it is a noun in itself with its own gender in the
> genitive case. But instead, you could derive a possessive adjective
> which did agree with its noun. For an example I'll tack bits onto
> spanish since english doesn't actually have adjective agreement
> (forgetting about the occasional almost pair like blond and blonde).
> Suppose you could add the ending... I don't know... -oro to form a
> possessive adjective. Then you could have:
>
> el coche de Juan   =   el coche Juanoro
> las casas de Juan   =   las casas Juanoras
>
> etc. Would this be a workable alternative to having a genitive or
> something similar?
No problem.  There are natlangs with this feature.  It is called
"suffixaufnahme".

>       The problem I suppose is that you couldn't apply
> adjectives to such a phase, unlike a genitive noun in a language like
> latin which can have its own adjectives. So you probably couldn't say
> "the big car's wheels", unless you have an augmentive affix...
I see no problem here.  Why not combine the suffixes on the adjective
as well, as in

wheel-PL-ACC car-GEN-PL-ACC big-GEN-PL-ACC

or in your Spanish model,

_las ruedas cochoras grandoras_

?

At least, this is how it will work in my conlang (currently under
construction) Old Albic, and I assume that natlangs with suffixaufnahme
do the same.

Greetings,

Jörg.