Re: genitive

ebera sikyal:

> >I understand 'possessive case', but I fail to understand 'adjective case'.
> >The way "adjective" is normally used is to denote a different part of
> >speech, not a noun case.
>
> Adjective *is* a noun case. The noun marked at the adjective provides an
> additional information on the quality or the state of its referent. Just
> like the locative provides an information on where its referent is.
You're close to something true here, but you're not exactly right.  It is
true that adjectives are not really a category of their own.  It is also
true that in many European languages, adjectives can be considered a
subset of nouns.  However, it is NOT true that adjectives *are* nouns or
are a noun case.  In many Asian languages, the adjectives are a
subset of verbs, and in many other languages "adjective" function is split
between nouns and verbs.

Description is something that can be made either a noun or a verb.  If you
choose to make it a noun or a noun case, then more power to you.  My own
conlang does something similar.  However, you cannot insist that
adjectives *must be* noun cases, because this is not true.  They *might*
be noun cases, but they might be verbs, or they might get their own minor
class.

> In most european languages, some specific kind of nouns are left unmarked
> at the adjective (like 'blue'), but most nouns/verb roots are
> 'adjectivized' (i.e. marked at the adjective case) by an inflection, even
> when the rest of the language has an isolating structure. This specific
> treatment makes it look like a different part of speech, but it is not.
"Part of speech" doesn't have any meaning except in reference to a
particular language.  I would agree that adjectives are not a proper part
of speech in Dutch and Latin, but they behave differently enough in
English (for example) that they must be classed separately.  If you look
at them from a universal standpoint, adjectives are a hybrid, a chimera
that can be noun or verb or its own thing.

> You should abstract yourself a little more from your native language.
As should you.

> That English speakers imagine adjectives are a different part of speech,
> and that they imagine it so much that they create words which are used only
> in this case (like 'big') will not make me accept that it is really
> different.
Well, that depends on your perspective.  In English, adjectives are
different, but they aren't in every language.  You are correct to question
the assumed distinction between adjective and noun.  You are wrong to
assert that the distinction is meaningless in English.  For your own
language, of course, do as you wish.

> In the way they work, adjectives are nouns. I must be more
> 'clever' than natives to avoid my conlang the flaws of English. Here I'm
> speaking about implementation issues (conlanging), not natlang analysis
> (linguistics).
In this case, I think the linguistic analysis does matter for language
creation.  We simply need to be aware that adjectives aren't as simple as
we think they are, either as a noun case or a part of speech.


Jesse S. Bangs jaspax@u.washington.edu

"If you look at a thing nine hundred and ninety-nine times, you are
perfectly safe; if you look at it the thousandth time, you are in
frightful danger of seeing it for the first time."
--G.K. Chesterton