Re: Of of

On 3/28/06, Peter Bleackley <Peter.Bleackley@...> wrote:.
>
> Now, suppose we want to say "The King's knight's horse". The logical
> extension of the paradigm is
>
> of of King knight horse.
>
> This seems somewhat inelegant. What do natlangs (or conlangs for that
> matter) with similar syntax do?
>
Sumerian had this quirk, too, although in a different order:

é lugal -ak -a
house king of in
"In the house of the king"

é SeS lugal -ak -ak -a
house brother king of of in
"In the house of the brother of the king"

This pattern has sometimes been called Suffixhäufung (not to be
confused with Suffixaufnahme, which sometimes looks similar on the
surface but is really different underneath.)

----------

One possibility, if you're going to go for naturalism, is to go the
Sumerian way and make them enclitics (clitic suffixes): in general,
suffixes are less resistant to "stacking" than prefixes.

If you want to go with independent particles like "of", and don't like
the idea of the repetition, you could inflect the particle for (say)
gender.  (Either the gender of the possessor or that of the possessum;
your call.)  If you have just two genders with a pretty equal
distribution of words between them, the likelyhood of identical
particles drops to half; with three, a third, with ten, a tenth, etc.
(This reminds me a bit of Ancient Greek, as someone above noted.)

A third is to work out something vaguely along the lines of Modern
Arabic's idafa construction, in which the relevant particle occurs
only once.  Say you have four particles: an indefinite and definite
article, and the same in the genitive.

DEF horse
INDEF horse
DEF-GEN king horse
DEF-GEN king brother horse
DEF-GEN king brother knight horse
INDEF-GEN king brother knight horse

The genitive phrase continues until it hits another article, a verb,
or something like that.  It works because definites tend to possess
definities and indefinites tend to possess indefinites.  If we left
all the relevant particles in, stuff like DEF-GEN DEF-GEN DEF-GEN and
INDEF-GEN INDEF-GEN INDEF-GEN will be more likely than mixes.

(Actually, you don't really need a contrast between DEF and DEF-GEN,
nor between INDEF and INDEF-GEN.  It happens that you won't run into a
situation in which the distinction is crucial.)

-- Pat