Re: Polysynthetic nouns

Hallo!

On Wed, 2 Jun 2004 02:00:48 -0700,
william drewery <will65610@...> wrote:

> Does anyone know where I could find info on polysynthetic noun
> grammer? So far, all I've ran into is a small abstract about Tamara, a
> language that marks grammatical case on a noun for both the functions
> that noun serves in a main clause as well as a subordinate clause,
> http://www.linguistics.unimelb.edu.au/events/seminars/abstracts/2000/aikhenvald.html
> I'm sure that other languages do this, but I can't find any. Indeed, I
> can't even find a decent description of what goes on in Tamara.
Sounds quite much like suffixaufnahme.  My conlang Old Albic has
suffixaufnahme, which means that a noun modifying another noun is
marked with the number and case of the head noun as well as with its
own number and case.  Examples:

mbar  o-s   mbestiro-s
house M-GEN baker-GEN
`the house of the baker'

(The little bit in the middle is a definite article.  The head noun
has no article because, being possessed, it counts as definite.)

The locative plural of this NP is:

mber-im-as   o-s-i-s      mbestirø-s-i-s
house-PL-LOC M-GEN-PL-LOC baker-GEN-PL-LOC
`in the houses of the baker'

Keep in mind that the `baker' is still singular;
`in the houses of the bakers' would be:

mber-im-as   i-s-i-s       mbestir-i-s-i-s
house-PL-LOC PL-GEN-PL-LOC baker-PL-GEN-PL-LOC

and `in the house of the bakers':

mbar-as   e-s-as     mbestir-e-s-as
house-LOC PL-GEN-LOC baker-PL-GEN-LOC

This can be driven even further:

dvar-ana mbar-as-ana   o-s-as-ana    mbestiro-s-as-ana
door-ALL house-LOC-ALL M-GEN-LOC-ALL baker-GEN-LOC-ALL
`to the door of the house of the baker'

Adjectives belonging to such a dependent NP also carry all that marking:

mbar-as   o-s-as    mbestiro-s-as mach-o-s-as
house-LOC M-GEN-LOC baker-GEN-LOC big-M-GEN-LOC
`in the house of the big baker'

If all that looks complicated, well, it is.  But I hope it makes sense.

Abbreviations in the examples above:

ALL  allative
GEN  genitive
LOC  locative
M    masculine
PL   plural

Greetings,

Jörg.