Re: HELP: Relative Clauses with Postpositions

David asks:

>  I was trying to do some work on the Babel text in a language of
>mine, and came
>>  across some problems with the sentence "They found a plain in the land of
>>  Shinar".   Here are the facts:
>>
>>  -SOV word order
>>  -Postpositional
>>  -Cases: Nom., Acc., Gen., Dat., Loc., Inst., Adverbial.
>>  -A noun in the genitive follows the noun it possesses.
>>  -A noun modified by a preposition (generally) gets the locative case.
>>
>>  Now here's the problem.   The above sentence would, basically,
>>look something
>>  like this:
>>
>>  plain land [of Shinar] in [they found it]
>>
>>  There might also be a verb like Spanish "estar" in there, but that's not the
>>  tough part.   I'm trying to figure out where to put that postposition.   It
>>  just doesn't make sense to me.   Which seems more "right":
>>
>>  plain-ACC. land-NOM. Shinar-GEN. in [they found it]
>>
>>  or
>>
>>  plain-ACC. land-LOC. Shinar-GEN. in [they found it]
>>
>>  or
>>
>  > plain-ACC. land-LOC. in Shinar-GEN. [they found it]
>
>  > Anyway, what I want to avoid is doing what Turkish or Japanese does, where
>>  you'd say something like "the in-the-land-of-Shinar plain".
I'm not a native speaker, but I'm thinkin' "Shinar-so-called land's
inside's plain"

Shinaaru to iu koku no naka no soogen (don't know the word for
"plain", soogen is a guess)

>  And I actually
>>  have a good reason for wanting to avoid this construction, I just...can't
>  > remember it.   Anyway, can you help?
If you go to Nik Taylor's website at:

http://members.tripod.com/~Nik_Taylor/Religion/Gearthuns_Babel.html

you'll find the way my lang, Géarthnuns handles it:

rhaur lé sö nggíshabsöt cha dínsav Shinarsaub thfau zçírhéf

they-nom past-aux a plain-acc the place-loc Shinar-postpositional thfau* find

*thfau is a postposition which Philippe might describe as "callative"
or someone else alluded to with apposition (Géarthnuns speakers see
"thfau" as the sister of "sfen" - "as"). I wanted to maintain
genitive as purely a case of possession as I could, and when the "of"
links two things that are the same (e.g. the commonwealth of
Massachusetts; commonwealth = Massachusetts), I opted for the "thfau"
approach. Locative in Géarthnuns does not require a postposition, but
often is used a substitute for a postpositional phrase when context
is clear. If you wanted to get really specific and say "in", you get:

rhaur........cha dínsab bö Shínarsaub thfau zçírhéf

the place-post in Shinar-post thfau find

So from my perspective, your intuition that the third choice is best
works. Latin, however, (though it doesn't use postpositions per se
(yeah, yeah, "tecum", "mecum", etc.)) is happy with expressions like
summa cum laude, so maybe you could find a way to swing choice two.
If locative in your lang takes a postposition, then, as Herman said,
it ought to be unambiguous enough. I toyed with the idea of allowing
both choice two and three in Géarthnuns, but for some reason, to my
ear, the postpositional case ending "-b" demanded the postposition
directly after. So I get breaks like in the expression "under Peter's
chair" which would be rendered:

the chair-post under Peter-gen

Kou