Re: Antigenetive case?

    Heard people were talking about the construct and cases, etc.  My first
language, Megdevi, has a construct case.  It's marked by the circumfix /?A-
-uT/.  Example:

/devId/ = man
/benIj/ = dog
/devId ?AbenIjuT/ = The man's dog (literally "the man the dog of")

    My language has an accusative tag; that's it (it's super regular, very
simplistic).  So, if you were to say...

"The man's dog sees the woman."

/devId ?AbenIjuT vasaZi Zi megInIn/

(where /vasaZi/ is "sees" in the present, /Zi/ is "the", and /megInIn/ is
"woman", with the accusative tag /-In/)

    Flip that around, though...

"The woman sees the man's dog."

/Zi megIn vasaZi devId ?AbenIjuT/

    And you don't get the accusative marking.  Word order is free in this
language, except in certain cases, where certain word orders are called for,
such as sentences with the verb "to be" in them, and sentences where
construct case nouns are objects--it's always SVO.
    As for Arabic...
/al-bInt (hija) madina/ = "The girl is a city" (silly sentence)
/bInt al-madina/ = "The girl of the city"
    Not a construct case.  It just happens that in noun combinations like
this, only the last word in the set takes the definite article, /al/.
    If you were to throw more on there...
/bInt waalid raZul al-madina/ = "The girl of the father of the man of the
city", or "The city's man's father's girl".
    So I don't think it's a construct state.

-David

"fawiT, Gug&g, tSagZil-a-Gariz, wAj min DidZejsat wazid..."
"Soft, driven, slow and mad, like some new language..."
                    -Jim Morrison