Re: Ethnologue

Christophe Grandsire <christophe.grandsire@...> parisen:

>En réponse à James Landau <Neurotico@...>:
>
>>
>>  Uhh . . . how about THESE genitives?
>>
>>  mia . . . genitive of mi
>>  via . . . genitive of vi
>>  lia . . . genitive of li
>>  sxia . . . genitive of sxi
>>  gxia . . . genitive of gxi
>>  nia . . . genitive of ni
>>  ilia . . . genitive of ili
>>  sia . . . genitive of si
>>  cia . . . genitive of ci
>>
>
>Well, as you have probably seen by now, I already replied to this one.
 Have I ever seen it! I've seen that I definitely wasn't the first to respond 
to this. Of course, that sort of thing seems to happen all the time on this 
list. Several people will each respond independently, immediately seeing a 
note, perhaps in which someone asks a question to which everyone else knwos 
the answer, and only later they'll all read the following notes to discover 
that someone else has already answered . . . and before you know it, our 
daily limit is exceeded because of too many clone posts.

>Basically, genitives that agree in number and case with the noun they 
complete
>are not genitives, they are adjectives.
 
 Uh . . . aren't genitives (at least those long the lines of "carpenter's", 
"Hund(e)s", "Jungen", "Kurts", "Jessica's", etc.) adjectives too?

>And in the case of the adjectives you are referring to, their possessive 
meaning is 
>just incidental and due to the meaning of the *roots*, not of the affix.
 The suffix "-a" on the pronouns is more than an adjective marker, it's a 
suffix with a very clearly defined meaning fixed for a limited group of words 
(by "due to the meaning of the *roots*", I'm assuming you mean due to the 
pronominal nature of the roots, and not that there is anything inherently 
possessive about the concept of "you" or "me", which was the impression I got 
when I first read this). For most of the use of "-a", there is no real 
predictive rule for "-a", except that the word will be an adjective. 
Therefore there is no rule that covers a word like "varma", which could have 
meant "pertaining to warmth" or "tending to make warmer (warming)", although 
"varmanta" would be readily available for the second, but you never know. You 
just have to learn each word like "varma", "nigra", "tipa", etc. individually 
and make educated guesses with common sense. But a few groups are very 
controlled. "-a" on a number, for instance, is the specific ordinal suffix of 
Esperanto. "Dua" means second (two+ORDINAL), not something like "dual" as an 
encounterer might expect. -a on the pronouns is the possessive affix on the 
non-correlative pronouns, so "mia" could not mean "egoic", only "my", nor can 
"via" mean "second-person". And what about the correlative "-a"? Certainly 
that can't be simply the same thing as the adjective suffix; you'd think 
"kia" and "tia" meant "which/what" and "that" used as determiners (instead 
they use "kio" and "tio") if you didn't learn that -a meant "kind of". This 
use was intended for the table of correlatives; surely Zamenhof didn't intend 
to imply that "kiu" and "tiu" were imperatives! -u (person) is of a different 
genesis from -u (imperative). So this, like the correlative ending, seems to 
be of a different genesis than the "-a" adjective ending. Not all the -a 
endings were the same suffix, and there appears to be at least five different 
meanings for -a: adjective, possessive, correlative for type/variety, 
ordinal, and girls' names (not even adjectives). I don't think Zamenhof 
intended the later four uses to be extensions of the applicability of the 
adjectival suffix in the -o/-i/-a/-e quartet. Therefore I could not call 
these words simple adjectives with the possessive meaning unaffected by the 
affix.

>Thus they cannot be treated as genitives.
 Would this mean that "me" has no genitive in English (or "moi" in French)? 
Other than "of me" ("part of me, "the end of me")? Or that "cxies" and 
"nenies" were not genitives in Esperanto since they're not formed by "de"? 
(Or, if you choose to use "-ies" as your touchstone for genitivity, as you 
and Jean-Franc,ois seem to have agreed on, would nouns that are the object of 
"de" not be in the genitive?) Using this argument, one could say French has 
no genitive because everything is either made the object of de/d' or is 
modified from a pronoun. Now if it has no genitive case, then how would you 
handle the fact that pronoun forms change across . . . across, well, er, 
cases? (Je, moi, mon/ma, or in Spanish, yo, mi, mi, me, -migo)

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