Re: Ethnologue

En réponse à James Landau <Neurotico@...>:

>
>  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.
>
Which is why I never reply before reading *all* the posts that come from
Conlang. For instance, this morning I had received 40 messages, and I read
everyone of them before beginning to reply to the ones I wanted (it also often
helps me cut down the number of replies I want to give, so all in all I win
time ;)) ).

>
>  Uh . . . aren't genitives (at least those long the lines of
> "carpenter's",
> "Hund(e)s", "Jungen", "Kurts", "Jessica's", etc.) adjectives too?
>
Nope, they are noun forms. You're confused because in English adjectives don't
agree with the nouns they complete. Look at Latin for instance, and you'll see
very well the difference between adjectives and genitives.

>
>  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).
Indeed, I meant the fact that they were personal pronouns.

 For most of the use of "-a", there is no real
>
> predictive rule for "-a", except that the word will be an adjective.
Which is rule enough in most cases.

> 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,
Nope, unless you have a verb "varmi" meaning "to make warmer". The verb would
be better "varmigi" and the participle "varmiganta".

 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.
Indeed, and that's due to the nature of the root itself, since it doesn't
happen for anything but numbers. Why trying to give more than one meaning to
the adjective suffix when it's enough to explain everything by the meaning of
the root and the class in which it belongs to?

 -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"?
It is separated from the adjective suffix, since correlatives are *not*
compounded forms. They look like it, and they can be described this way, but
they are actually root forms.

> 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).
Indeed.

 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,
But only the correlatives are a special case. You *needn't* make any other case
special, so why should you?

 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).
Girls' names are even something else, since if they are Esperanto they *must*
end in -o. It's just that Esperanto accepts foreign names for people without
Esperantising them automatically (and because people are prejudiced against -o
for women). But your analysis is unnecessary and complicates things that are
simple, so why should it even be used? Since it depends only on the kind of
root which meaning will be given to the -a form, why should we say there are
more than one -a suffix? That would be valid only if there were homophonous
forms with slightly different meanings (i.e. two "varma", one meaning "warm",
the other "pertaining to warmth"). Only in that case you could argue that there
are more than one meaning for -a. But since the meaning of the -a form is
unique for each root, there's no need to pretend -a has more than one meaning.

 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.
>
Yet they are. When something walks like a duck and kwacks like a duck...

>
>  Would this mean that "me" has no genitive in English (or "moi" in
> French)?
French "moi" has indeed no genitive.

> 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"?
I never denied that the -ies forms were genitival. You're putting in my mouth
things I never said. So please start by reading what I say before trying to
make me say things I never did just to prove your point! It makes your point
moot this way.

> (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?)
Did you even read what I wrote? If you did, then what you're doing is
dishonest. I never said those things, and I'm not contradicting myself, so stop
pretending I am by making me say things I never wrote! I hate when people try
to pretend they know better than me what I think!

 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.
French has indeed no true genitive. It has always been analysed this way, and
that's the best way to analyse it. It has prepositional complements which can
have a possessive meaning. But that's only one of their possible meaning (the
preposition "de" is more an "associative" than a true "possessive"). And it has
*no* modified form of pronouns that can be considered genitives (even
the "dont" is just a form for *"de qui/de que", and its possessive meaning is
secondary).

 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)
>
But French "mon" and Spanish possessive "mi" are *not* forms of the pronouns!
They are both adjectives (and for this reason agree with the noun they
complete) evolved from the Latin pronoun-adjective "meus, mea, meum" which was
*not* directly related to "ego" (to get the relation, you have to get directly
back to PIE!). The non-nominative forms of ego and the possessive pronoun-
adjective "meus" (which as pronoun meant "mine", not "I", so it *cannot* be a
form of "ego"!) do share a common PIE root, but in Latin times and afterwards
they are two different things altogether, only related by meaning and not by
form! Latin did have a genitive of "ego". That was "mei": "of me" and was used
only with verbs that needed a genitive for there direct object!

In short, indeed "me" is the accusative/dative of "je, moi" in French,
but "mon" is certainly *not* its genitive! It's a different thing altogether
which is *not* derived from the pronoun, and was already not in Latin times.
And in this respect, Esperanto works the same way.

As I said already, there *are* languages which instead of a genitive use
adjectival forms of nouns (Hittite, IIRC, is an example). For those languages,
your analysis would be correct. It just happens that it's not valid for the
languages you're trying to apply it too. An analysis which makes things more
complicated than another (or which doesn't fit the facts as you tried to do
with French) is *not* an acceptable analysis. Occam's razor rules.

Christophe.

http://rainbow.conlang.free.fr

Take your life as a movie: do not let anybody else play the leading role.

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