Re: Genitive relationships (WAS: Construct States)

At 12:22 pm -0800 6/3/99, Sally Caves wrote:
>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..
Yeah, tho the Welsh/Cornish/Breton method & modern Arabic are AFAIK
practically alike in this respect, both Hebrew and the Gaelic langs remind
us that the constructions were not once quite so identical.  The Celtic
langs do not have noun A in a contruct state as Hebrew & the earlier
Semitic langs do/did & the Gaelic langs have noun B in the gentive case and
this was undoubtedly so at one time in Brittonic.

>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).
Inter alia
- only two genders - masc. & fem.
- adjectives follow the noun
- verb is put first
- definite article but no indefinite one
- conjugated prepositions

And the consonant mutations of Biblical Hebrew are very reminiscent of the
consonant mutations of the Gaelic langs (at least in their earlier forms).

> 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.
There was long contact between the Semitic world & Britain: the Phoenicians
traded with the "Tin Isles" (i.e. the Cornish peninsular) for several
centuries I believe.  A Semitic based trade jargon could have developed in
this area.

Also, of course, these islands were inhabited long before Celts arrived
here.  The builders of stone Henge & the megaliths belong to a western
European civilization which predated the arrival of the Celts.  One theory
ascribes a north African origin to this "Iberian" strain which would link
them with the Berber peoples of north Africa.  Thus the connexion would be
Hamito-semitic rather than directly Semitic and the apparently 'Semitic'
features of insular Celtic would be due to the influence of an underlying
"Iberian" stratum.

Personally, I find neither theory proven. And there are features shared by
all the modern Celtic langs which AFAIK are not found in the Semtic langs,
in particular the extensive use of the verbnoun which gives rise to a whole
host of periphrastic verbal forms.

Ray.