Re: Genitive relationships (WAS: Construct States)

Padraic Brown wrote:

> On Tue, 2 Mar 1999, FFlores wrote:
>
> >
> > As you've seen, all Semitic langs do. But reading
> > those posts I realized a similar thing (totally
> > unrelated) happens in Welsh! I don't know too much
> > about it, but I understand two noun phrases in
> > juxtaposition "A B" form a genitive construction
> > "A of B". Is this a general phenomenon?
>
> As far as I know, it's the normal way for Welsh to do it.
Yes, I was going to make this point as well.
The other Celtic languages, too..  I've
noted before, months ago, that a linguist friend
of mine, Orin Gensler, wrote an enormous
dissertation on the typology of the Celtic and
Semitic languages... that there are a remarkable
number of grammatical constructions in common
between Celtic and Semitic besides this
way of forming the genitive (the only other one
I can think of at the moment is "the girl, blue-her-eyes,
I love" meaning: "I love the girl whose eyes are blue"
--I copied this shamelessly into Teonaht).  Other
linguists have tried without success to explain
why these similarities should exist between two
languages that apparently had no contact that we know of.

Sally Caves
scaves@frontiernet.net
http://www.frontiernet.net/~scaves/teonaht.html