Construct state and/or genitive case in Semitic langs

Hallo!

On Wed, 17 May 2006 19:18:46 -0400, Jim Henry wrote:

> According to the Wikipedia article I cited, Arabic has a
> genitive case as well as a construct state.  I'm not sure
> about Hebrew, but surely one or more persons on this list
> will know.  This article
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hebrew_grammar
>
> is unclear on the genitive and/or construct state and I suspect
> (based on its apparent inconsistency with what I've heard
> elsewhere) that it may be inaccurate.
Hebrew has a construct state and no genitive case (it doesn't have a case
system at all).

> [...]
>
> > >>Is "construct state" a "case", as it seems at the moment?  Or is it
> > >>like "definite" and "indefinite", whatever they are?
>
> [...]
>
> That I don't know.  If for instance a noun can be marked as both nominative
> and construct, or accusative and construct, but can't be
> both construct and definite or both construct and indefinite, then I
> would say that construct is a kind of definiteness marking
> in a given language.  But I don't know if that is true of Arabic
> and/or Hebrew.
In Arabic, a noun in the construct state can be in any case.  Hence, it is
just plain wrong to call the construct state a "case" - it is indeed like a
kind of definiteness marking.  A noun in the construct state doesn't take
the definite article but is considered definite without it.  In Arabic,
it is also not nunated (marked as indefinite by suffixing -n).  So you have:

_baytun_ 'a house' (indefinite)
_al baytu_ 'the house' (definite)
_baytu l-rajuli_ 'the man's house' (construct state)

These are all in the nominative case.  The accusatives are:

_baytan_
_al bayta_
_bayta l-rajuli_

In modern colloquial Arabic, the case endings and the nunation are lost:

_bayt_
_al bayt_
_bayt al-rajul_

If I made a mistake and the Arabic forms I gave are incorrect, or utterly
misunderstood the way the Arabic system works, please correct me.

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