Re: Antigenetive case?

At 2:31 PM +0200 8/9/02, julien eychenne wrote:
>I sent that this morning, but only too Joe. Sorry :
>
>
>>  Has anyone thought of a case which marks a genetive, but marks it on the
>>  posessed, not the posessor? I'll make up an example --
>>  Does this exist in any natlangs?
>
>Yes, nawatl has this feature, even if it's not a genetive case but
>rather a posessor prefix. For example, /kal-li/ is "house(s)" (root
>-kal-), and if you want to say "my house", the form is /no-kal/.
>Then, "the woman's house", it is /i:-kal siwa:t^l/ 'her house the
>woman', where /i:/ is the 3rd person possessor suffix (and
>/siwa:t^l/ is "the woman").
This really isn't the same thing at all. The possessive prefixes in
Nahuatl are just that -- possessive prefixes. Pronouns of all
varieties in Nahuatl are proclitic (there are independent pronouns,
but they are transparently built on the stem -huatl/-huantin).

The change in the shape of the possessed word is not due to case
inflection, but to the presence of the absolutive suffix in the
unpossessed form (for cal- 'house', the suffix is -li; for cihua-
'woman' the suffix is -tl). The absolutive suffix is not a case form,
but a marker to show that the noun is not possessed or part of a
compound or postpositional phrase. It appears throughout the
Uto-Aztecan language family; in some languages it only shows up in
fossilized forms, while in others its use is productive and robust.

Dirk
--
Dirk Elzinga                  Dirk_Elzinga@byu.edu

Man deth swa he byth thonne he mot swa he wile.
'A man does as he is when he can do what he wants.'

- Old English Proverb

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