Agreeing with possessives, was: Yet another introduction

On Sat, 22 Sep 2001 13:51:43 +0400, Pavel Iosad <pavel_iosad@...> wrote:

>> >Yes, with the difference that Hungarian thinks of the possessive in
>> >terms of it just being definite, and Tolwd has separate
>> conjugations for
>> >the definite object and for the possessive object.
>>
>> Interesting. I thought of a system where 3rd person, inanimate can
>> convey such meanings as 'this thing of mine', 'this thing of
>> yours', etc.
>> It was inspired by an example from some Amerind language. I
>> even invented
>> a way for such system to emerge.
>
>Details, please? :-P~~~~~~~~~~~~
A longish story...

I was designing a protolanguage for a conlang family. The protolang
was to be an a priori conlang (probably, the last a priori thing of
mine). It was going to be isolating and quasi-monosyllabic. More exactly,
it resembled Khmer: normally a word was one syllable, or one syllable
extended with a prefixoid.

I wanted a complex system of personal pronouns, so that daughter languages
could simplify it in various ways, with seemingly dissimilar sets of
pronouns/agreement affixes as the outcome.

It thought it would look dull if I postulate over two dozens of unrelated
pronominal roots. So I designed only a few basic roots and decided that
combinations of two roots can contract, with first root remaining as the
prefixoid, to produce meanings like 'he, with me', 'I, with you', etc.
Such contracted forms would supply me with prototypes for dual,
inclusive/exclusive, etc.

Now, I noticed that I can also utilize forms like 'I, with it' or 'It,
(which is) with me'. One of the ideas was that some daughter languages
would adopt such forms as agreement affixes referring both to a noun and
its possessor, in sentences like:

It wasn't my cat that spoiled your carpet. It (my cat, 3.sg+poss.1.sg) has
been lying on my sofa all day.

Another way to utilize them was to refer to instrumental actants, but I
haven't explored this idea in depth.


Basilius