Re: Basque bizarreries (was: Conland Digest etc.)

>>Prolative should be Destinative (but *instead of*
>>looks rather different to me from *for the benefit
>>of*; probably two concepts mixed here...).
>
>Not really. I think the idea is that of someone taking the place of
someone
>else to do something, giving that second person a favour, hence "instead
>of" and "in the benefit of" can be easily related. Note though that the
>Destinative has two forms: -tzat for the "instead of" meaning, and -
entzat
>for the "in the benefit of" meaning.
>
>However, if the Prolative and the Destinative are the same, I can't
>understand how it can claim that the Prolative can be used only in the
>indefinite. My book, taking "txori": bird, lists: "txori(ren)tzat":
instead
>of (a) bird(s), "txoria(ren)tzat": instead of the bird,
and "txorientzat":
>instead of the birds. The Destinative can *easily* be used with the
>definite :) .
"Prolative" for the -tzat case of Basque is actually
a misnomer, although it seems that it has become the
established name for it in Basque grammars.

The meaning of the -tzat suffix is that of "for an
angel" and "as a reporter" in the English sentences
"He was mistaken for an angel" and "He works as a
reporter". It is kind of an essive, in the sense that
it denotes what someone/something is 'thought to be'
or 'acts as'.

The -entzat case is in fact a compound of -en + -tzat,
i.e. the genitive followed by the 'prolative', and the
name "Destinative" is in this case correct, because that's
the actual semantic interpretation of -entzat. The logic
behind this is that something that is "for the bird"
(txoriarentzat) is to "be of the bird" (txori-a-[r]en-tzat).

Cheers,
Javier

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