Re: Ethnologue

On Monday 10 February 2003 11:44 pm, James Landau wrote:
> 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)
No, 'my' is a genitive.  mon/ma/mes and mi/mis are not.