Re: HELP: Relative Clauses with Postpositions

David Peterson wrote:
>
> 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]
>
> For some reason, the last one seems like the one that
> "should" be correct, to me, but then it ends up looking
> like the wacky language we've been discussion, where
> you have an adposition coming between two NP's.

The middle one seems most natural to me. Consider
the phrase "in a red box." Wouldn't this be:

   box-LOC red in

A genitive is much like an adjective, so I'd think

   land-LOC Shinar-GEN in

would be the way to go.

(Could "Shinar" be treated as an appositive? That is,
could you say "in the land Shinar"? Perhaps:

   land-LOC Shinar-LOC in


--Ph. D.