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

Andreas Johansson scripsit:

> > 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".
So there are lexical rules about when to use prep-genitive and when to
use s-genetive?  "Boston's mayor" sounds unnatural in English, but
no more or less so than "Boston's king" -- probably because the
relationship is not possessive, and s-gen. is avoided when not
possessive, except where both a subjective and an objective genitive
are present, as in "John's adoption of Irene".

_Time_ magazine used to be notorious for un-English forms like
"Florida's governor" for "the governor of Florida", as well as for
odd syntax ("Backward ran sentences until reeled the mind", in the
words of a parody) and erecting every attributive adjective applied
to a person into a capitalized title ("Poet Robert Frost said today").

It's still common for newspapers and magazines to omit leading
definite articles ("Focus of the discussion was as follows"), presumably
on the notion that they sound snappier.

> _Kungens av Boston hatt_ could be found in archaic or archaizing language.
In English too.  Malory's _Mort D'Arthur_ frequently says "the king's son
of Ireland" for "the son of the king of Ireland" or "the king of Ireland's
son", which is absolutely unidiomatic nowadays.

> > 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 misled you: the first "'s" is the verb "is".  I considered fixing this
for clarity, but decided to leave it alone in the name of authenticity.
So "the young lady I go with's" is formally parallel to "John's", but
certainly an extreme case that would be edited out of formal prose.
--
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