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

Stone Gordonssen wrote at 2003-05-19 15:44:45 (-0700)
 > >Aha!  So a conlang urgently needs a syntactical difference between
 > >genitive and possessive.
 >
 > google for material on the conlang "Laadan" by Suzette Elgin - it has
 > several types of posessives. I know that some natlangs do too.
 >
 > >*making notes for next project*
 >
 > 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.
 >

I've thought about this a bit myself, and I quite agree.  "My home"
"my father" "my murderer" "my victim" "my arm" - the relationship
between possessor and possessed is different for each.

As for natlangs which make a distinction - there's the well-known
opposition between alienable and inalienable possession, made in many
Polynesian and Amerindian languages.  In the Amerindian languages
inalienable possessions are often mandatorily possessed, so that it is
grammatically impossible to say "a hand" without specifying at least
an indefinite possessor: "someone's hand".   Some notes on this
phenomenon in Tzotzil may be found at this URL:
http://www.zapata.org/Tzotzil/Chapters/chapt4.html#4.5

If anyone can supply details of a natlang making a more specific
possessive distinction than this, I'd be very interested to hear of it.

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