Re: Mandarin demonstratives (Re: Charyan novel! (was: Re: [CONLANG] I'm back!))

H. S. Teoh wrote:
....and locative structures ("zai4 wo3
>> hou4mian4"; "behind me";; "zai4 zhuo1zi shang4"; "on the table")?
>
>Hmm, for some odd reason, "zai4 wo3 hou4mian4" seems to me to be a
>contraction of "zai4 wo3 de hou4mian4" ("my behind" = "behind me", but
>without the connotations it has in English.)
>
Hmm, this is beginning to sound a lot like Kash constructions I'm struggling
with in my Syntax document.  Fortunately we have cases--

ri çeluñi kaçut
   çelum-ni
LOC back/behind(acc)-3poss.  man(nom.)
'(at) behind the man'

ri çelum kaçuti
   back(acc.) man(gen.)
'on the man's back'

with a pronoun it's ambiguous:
ri çelumbi
   çelum-mi
   back(acc)-1poss
'(at) behind me'  OR 'on my back'

This can be disambiguated, e.g.
yale vine ri nihiñi çelumbi
                 nihin-ni
there-is  wound LOC top/surface(acc)-3poss. back(nom.)-l poss.
There is a wound on [the surface of] my back.

Of course, in most cases, context would clarify the situation.

Having to go into this kind of detail is one of the reasons my Syntax doc.
was 100KB-plus (before it got lost).