Re: Genitive Relationships again

Sally Caves <scaves@...> wrote:
>
> Getting back to this old subject... I'm recalling a thread
> a while back about different words for family relations
> depending on who was the possessor.  In other words,
> for "my mother" there is one word you use in several
> natlangs and another for "your mother" or "his mother."
There's lots of that kind of doublets in Japanese, AFAIK.

> But I was thinking of making kinship words different in
> Teonaht according to who possesses them:  My Mom,
> but your Mutti, his or their Mater.  Of course many of
> these variations would migrate into the realm of poetic
> discourse, but it could be an interesting development.
What I've been doing this days in my latest lang,
SkanSey, is having different adjectives. The normal
adjectives (most of them) agree in gender with their
nouns, but some adjectives are gender-specific. The
genders (I mentioned them in another post) are air,
water and earth, and they apply to people and things.

This reminds me of English pairs like "beautiful"
and "handsome", which tend to be used for women and
men respectively. In SkanSey such doublets (actually
triplets) are grammatical.

Also, there are a lot of personal pronouns, because
gender also implies caste in this culture, and you
can't address air people (priestesses) the same way
you address water people (men) or earth people (married
women). So there are three pronouns per person and
number, each one being used when talking to each gender.

I think Japanese has something like this too, though
not so extensively used.


--Pablo Flores

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