Re: Theory about the evolution of languages

On Wed, 18 Aug 2004 09:39:53 -0400, Trebor Jung <treborjung@...> wrote:
> Philip wrote:
> "[...] I [don't] think that possessive pronouns are the genitive case of
> personal pronouns; they act like adjectives, not like nouns."
>
> IMHO this is rather fuzzy. How would you define these words to be acting
> like nouns tho? If they were derived with the clitic -'s? Couldn't one make
> a case for these being suppletive genitive-case forms of the personal
> pronouns? ;)
In other languages, one can see from verbs or prepositions that take
the genitive case.

However, possessive pronouns clearly do not behave identically to noun + -'s:

Tom's book -- my book
A book of Tom's -- *A book of my

Cheers,
--
Philip Newton <philip.newton@...>