Re: Antigenetive case?

At 9:37 AM +0200 8/12/02, julien eychenne wrote:
>On Fri, 9 Aug 2002 09:55:14 -0600
>Dirk Elzinga <Dirk_Elzinga@...> wrote:
>
>>  >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...
>
>But I didn't say it was a case. I just thought that nahuatl was a
>good example of a language marking possession on the possessed and
>not the possessor, but not especially by case inflection. I'm sorry
>if my answer leads to such a misunderstanding, but I never meant
>that absolutive suffix and or possessive prefix were cases. Anyway,
>you're right to clarify something which is not.
Okay. The subject line says "Antigenetive [sic] case?" so I assumed
you were showing Nahuatl as an example of such.

>  >for cal- 'house', the suffix is -li; for cihua-
>>  'woman' the suffix is -tl.
>
>I read that the underlying form was in both cases //tl// : */ltl/
>--> [ll] and the final [i] is an epenthetic vowel breaking an
>unlegal *CC coda. So <calli> //kal+li// would  morphologically be
>//kal+tl//, just like //siwa:+tl//. Is it a correct analysis?
Exactly. There are other consonant-final stems which take -tli:
tzontli 'head', teuctli 'lord', telpochtli 'young man', cuauhtli
'eagle', and octli 'pulque'. The /i/ is appended for precisely the
reason you mention.

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