Re: Edible and Drinkable Pronouns?

On 7/2/07, Jeff Rollin <jeff.rollin@...> wrote:
> In the last episode, (On Monday 02 July 2007 22:21:56), David J. Peterson
> wrote:
> > Jeff wrote:
> > <<
> > Just caught up on this. Looks like body-part nouns are inalienable
> > and take a
> > suffix?
> >
> >
> > If they're inalienable, doesn't that mean they shouldn't require
> > a suffix--e.g., you'd just say "the head", and that'd mean "my
> > head"...?
> >
>
> My understanding is that "inalienable" means "cannot be unpossessed", e.g. you
> couldn't say "I saw a [disembodied] head lying on the ground", but would have
> to say "I saw someone's head lying on the ground".
Not necessarily--you're talking about obligatory possession, and it's
not the same. Alienable possession uses different grammatical
machinery (a different pre/suffix or lack of a pre/suffix, different
syntactic construction, etc) than inalienable possession--nothing
more. The distinction is most often based on semantic categories like
body parts, kin terms, or culturally important items. One of my
undergraduate teachers explained the difference this way: In English
you can say "He hit me on the head/in the belly" to mean "he hit my
head/my belly," but "He hit me on the BMW" does not mean "he hit my
BMW". The possessive marked by a prepositional phrase is inalienable
and only applies to body parts. Nouns describing body parts and kin
terms typically show obligatory possession in languages with that
distinction. The difference is that there is usually no prohibition
against grammatically unpossessed inalienable nouns, while there is in
languages with obligatory possession; this is what distinguishes the
two types.

In Luiseno, a Uto-Aztecan language once spoken in Southern California
(San Diego area), nouns that were obligatorily possessed did include
kin terms and body parts. Interestingly, nouns that described natural
phenomena and wild animals could *not* be possessed. If you happened
to have a pet turtle, you could only describe it as your turtle by
saying 'my pet turtle'. This is a Southwest/Great Basin areal trait
observable in other languages of the region. In Numic languages,
including Shoshoni and Paiute, the pet word is _punku_. To say 'my
coyote' in Shoshoni, you say _ne punku itsappe_ 'my pet coyote'. In
Chemehuevi/Paiute it's something like _punkuu-n sinaav_ 'pet-my
coyote'.

> Jeff
Dirk