Re: inalienable possession

On Wed, 18 Nov 1998, Nik Taylor wrote:

> There are lots of possibilities that simply
> don't exist, Sally's split-nominative is a good example.  AFAIK, no
> language has that, and yet it's quite a simple, and, in retrospect,
> obvious distinction.  Center-embedding I can think of, but no language
> uses that, not regularly, at any rate.  I don't think that any languages
> mix pre- and postpositions, except for a few formulaic forms (like
> English "thereof", or Latin "mecum").
Teonaht does; that's because I modeled this tendency on English and Latin,
which retain something of their original SOV postpositional structures.
I'm about a hundred posts behind, here, so I don't know yet what anyone
else has said, but I imagine that if IE languages were originally SOV and
used postpositions, that the switch to SVO and prepositions would turn
up a number of archaisms in a number of languages.  Teonaht allows you
to say "bread and butter" or "bread butter and," depending on context
and *seemliness* of sound, a big deal in this language's prosody.  It also
allows you to put the adposition "between" in between the two items it
separates:  "the kite was stuck between the tree and the house":

                 il      eton iksyl        hovik-jo
        the kite the (P) tree between-the  house-and it was stuck.

Although this is admittedly cute.  Doesn't work so well for numbers or
simple plurals, and is used, mostly for effect.  More commonly:

                        iksyl eton hovik-jo
                        between the tree house-and


> > remember that in some languages, prepositions are conjugated like verbs.
>
> The Celtic langs do that with persons, tho the verbs don't.  For
> example, in Irish: dom = to me, duit = to you, etc.
Exactly.  In Welsh prepositions are conjugated according to person:

gennyf i, ganndo ef,
with me, with you, etc.

A remarkable feature that I don't think is peculiar only to the Celts.

Just to reverse the terms of this discussion (about postpositions becoming
case endings)... if the verb was final, wouldn't this account for the
number of verbs in Germanic that begin with prepositions?  I'm thinking
of that old standby

        Harold him with feaht
        Harold fought with him

that is always invoked as an example of SOV and postposition in OE.
Wouldn't this have given rise to the preposition/verb combination?
withstand, undergo, etc. etc.  I look at this sentence and wonder if the
proper division is not "with fought" rather than "him with."

Sally
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Sally Caves
scaves@frontiernet.net
http://www.frontiernet.net/~scaves/teonaht.html
http://www.frontiernet.net/~scaves/contents.html


Li fetil'aiba, dam hoja-le uen.
volwin ly, vul inua aiba bronib.

This leaf, the wind takes her.
She's old, and born this year.
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