Re: EAK - two problems

On 5/20/07, Philip Newton <philip.newton@...> wrote:
> On 5/20/07, R A Brown <ray@...> wrote:
> > [POSSESSION]
> > In 'Latino sine flexione' Peano was able to make use of the Latin
> > preposition _de_ in imitation of the Romancelangs and Vulgar Latin; even
> > in the written Classical language we find instances of 'de + abl.' used
> > instead of the genitive in certain situations. There is AFAIK nothing
> > comparable in Greek, where the genitive persists to the present day.
>
> Would _apó_ be a resonable candidate for AEK, too?
Another thing that came to mind was _ek_, or maybe _pará_ ("by", à la
Russian possession with _u XXX est'_), or maybe even _epí_ ("on", à la
Finnish possession with _XXX:lla on_).

I had also wondered whether a fixed/fossilized _tou_ would work -- _to
tou mètró patró_ "The mother's father". But since there's no
indefinite article, that wouldn't work as well for indefinite nouns,
let alone pronouns.

The main spanner in the works that comes to mind is adjectives used as
nouns -- I presume that AEK will have noun phrases such as _to sofó_
"the wise one". In that case, _to sofó patró_ could be either "The
wise father" or "The father of a wise one", if there is no genitive
particle and you rely merely on a regular particle (whether _to_ or
_tou_ doesn't matter, since the indefinite "a wise one" would take
neither article). Ditto for the inverted form _to patró to sofó_.

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

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