Re: Alienable/inalienable possession

On Sat, 4 Feb 2006 12:57:38 -0500, Roger Mills <rfmilly@...> wrote:
>Sylvia Sotomayor wrote:
>
>> On 2/4/06, Carsten Becker <carbeck@...> wrote:
>> > Hi there,
>> >
>> > I recently started a new project, Ukele [1], which is
>> > supposed to have alienable/inalienable posession. I wonder
>> > how would one express to have something or to give
>> > something away that is inalienable? E.g. a heart transplant
>> > or something? Body parts are usually inalienable, after all.
>>
>> KÄ“len has inalienable possession of body parts. The standard, unmarked
>> way to say 'heart' is 'samālle', which means 3p-'heart' or
>> 'his/her/someone's heart'. However, it is also possible to inflect
>> -māll- as an inanimate noun. This would be marked, people would look
>> at you funny, but in the context of a transplant, or the scientist's
>> jars of preserved body parts, it would make perfect sense. (snip exs.)
>
>Something like that IMO is probably the way to go...
>
>Timorese (aka Atoni, Dawan) has something similar-- inalienable poss. is
>marked with the suffixes -k, -m, -n (1,2,3 (sing.) resp.), generic
>with -f--thus atèn 'his/her heart/liver', atef 'heart/liver, in general'.
>I suppose as in, "We're having liver for dinner", perhaps "The dr. gave me
>a new heart", maybe "...shaped like a heart", but the available grammar is
>silent on the exact usage.
>
>Fijian of course has its lovely 4-way possession: 1. inalienable 2. edible
>3. drinkable 4. generic, alienable.
>=========================================================================
In one of my new languages, I'm just in the process of adding a 3rd
category besides alienable and inalienable: words that normally don't take
inalienable possession but can be modified so that they do. An example
would be the word for flower. The affixes for inalienable possessors are
the same as some verb affixes.

Jeff