Re: OT: Posession (was OT: Re: What? the clean-shaven)

> >Aha!  So a conlang urgently needs a syntactical difference between
> >genitive and possessive.
I wouldn't say that; certainly not "urgently".  Many languages make
the distinction, but others don't, and get along just fine.

On Mon, May 19, 2003 at 03:44:45PM -0700, Stone Gordonssen wrote:
> Posession alone can be a huge topic. Months ago, Suzette Elgin and I spent
> days trying to research and explain to a neophite the place of the false
> posessive within the whole context of posession . I ended up feeling that
> actually posession - e.g. "my book" - was little more than a minor subset of
> a much larger and also mystifying set of inter-item relationships.
Hm; I shall have to look into this.   I do know that the "genitive"
relationship is very broad and used in different ways by different
languages; for instance, the genitive of quantity ("five of them")
makes for an interesting concept that doesn't map well to the
possessive.

-Mark