Re: Inflecting Jesus Christ (was: Never violate a universal ...)

Quoting John Cowan <cowan@...>:

> Andreas Johansson scripsit:
>
> > Swedish disbeys #2. (You can, with good justification, argue that the -s
> > genitive is nowadays an enclitic, but I'll refuse to take seriously any
> > analysis that says that _Jesu_ is formed from _Jesus_ by adding a clitic!)
>
> /me waves hand and says "Suppletion".  :-)
It's suppletion, yes. That smiley makes me think there's a point buried here
somewhere, but I'm not seeing it.

> Do you have constructions in Swedish like "the mayor of Boston's hat"
> (standard)
That particular one would be "Boston's mayor's hat", but there's parallel
examples, say _kungen av Bostons hatt_ "the king of Boston's hat".

_Kungens av Boston hatt_ could be found in archaic or archaizing language.

> or "That umbrella's the young lady I go with's" (colloquial)?
Double genitive? Nope. But you could say _den unga damen jag går meds
paraply_, lit "the young lady I'm going with's umbrella".

> I've always thought it was a cool feature of German that "Jesus Christus"
> (or either part thereof) keeps its Latin inflections:
>
> Nom: Jesus Christus ist der EINZIGE Weg zu Gott.
> Gen: Wir sind alle Glieder des Leibes Jesus Christi.
> Dat: Na, heute Morgen habe ich einen Telefonanruf von Jesu Christo bekommen.
> Acc: Wir wollen nun untersuchen, was die Bibel tatsächlich über Jesum
>      Christum berichtet.
>
> All examples are from actual German web pages, and I tried to avoid
> pre-20th-century texts.  In passing, I also spotted these forms
> in Swedish, Danish, Norwegian, Finnish, and Dutch, but I don't believe
> there was any live usage.
Well, Swedish have only nom and gen, and the genitive _Jesu Kristi_ is alive
among many speakers, altho regularized _Jesus Kristus_ is probably more common
these days (and yes, it's formally identical to the nominative). I tend to use
the irregular form.

Back to things being clitics, these two forms work different in the Bostonian
example; _Jesu av Nasaret liv_ or _Jesus av Nasarets liv_ "Jesus of
Nazareths's life".

                                                            Andreas

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