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Re: Of of

From:taliesin the storyteller <taliesin-conlang@...>
Date:Saturday, April 1, 2006, 20:20
* Peter Bleackley said on 2006-03-28 10:27:09 +0200
> Consider a language where the genitive construction is of the form > PARTICLE POSSESSOR POSSESSED /snip/
AFMCL: (1) The King's horse (2) The King's knight's horse Since all three nouns are animate, this is very easy in Taruven: (1) King te horse / horse te King (2) King te knight te horse / King te horse te knight / knight te King te horse / knight te horse te King / horse te King te knight / horse te knight te King As you might have noticed from example 2) above, "te" doesn't build a hierarchy of who own who, since animates can't be owned in Taruven and hence cannot be part of such a hierarchy. Now in the original example 2, King modifies knight which modifies horse, therefore giving more focus to the horse. In Taruven you'd have to use an emphasis-prefix on horse to achieve the same thing. It becomes more interesting with only inanimate nouns though: (1) the cloud's color (2) the sky's cloud's color Which would be (the underline marks morpheme-boundaries): (1) cloud_GEN+ color_GEN- / color_GEN- cloud-GEN+ (2) sky_GEN+ cloud_GEN+_GEN- color_GEN- / sky_GEN+ color_GEN-_GEN- cloud_GEN+_GEN- / cloud_GEN+_GEN- sky_GEN+ color_GEN-_GEN- / cloud_GEN+_GEN- color_GEN- sky_GEN+ / color_GEN-_GEN- sky_GEN+ cloud_GEN+_GEN- / color_GEN-_GEN- cloud_GEN+_GEN- sky_GEN+ GEN+ marks the possessor, and can be dropped. GEN- marks possession, and cannot be dropped. The normal order is "A owns B", if B doesn't immediately follow A you get Suffixaufnahme on B, if there are more than two in the possession-chain, as is the case in example 2. In addition to "possession" for impossessable animates, using te, and possession for inanimates, using -ev for owner and -eð for possession, Taruven also has inalienable possession: the man's head becomes man-ji-head An inalienable possession of the head, like an eye, goes to the left: man-ji-head-ji-eye But toss in something alienably possessed and it starts to get complicated: man-ji-head-ji-eye_GEN+ color_GEN- Affixes on a ji-construction affects only the head (the leftmost noun), but the possessors in a ji-construction *can* carry their own *suffixes*, but not their own *prefixes*, so: man_PL-ji-head = "the men's head" This implies a shared head, which is generally not possible, so it acts as a shorter form of the next: man_PL-ji-head_PL = "the men's heads" (one head per man) But: 0_man-ji-head where 0 is zero number, means there were zero (or missing) heads, not that there were zero (or missing) men. t.