Re: Genitives NPs as Relative Clauses

Ar 00:03 16/11/01 -0500, bhac Herman Miller le scríobh chugam:
>On Thu, 15 Nov 2001 06:38:31 +0000, Keith Gaughan <kmgaughan@...>
>wrote:
>
> >In my (English) idiolect, it's not uncommon for me to use genitive
> >constructions
> >in the place of relative clauses. Example:
> >
> >     My idiolect:      ...of my seeing...
> >     `Normal English': ...that I see...
> >
> >It's not something I always use, and I can't predict when I use it but I
> do. I
> >think there's parallel idioms in Irish, but I can't think of any like it off
> >the top of my head.
> >
> >Ok, here's my question. I've been thinking of adapting this idiom for use in
> >Erëtas but I have doubts as to its scalability. Are there any other
> languages
> >that use similar constructions. Just for reference's sake, here's how I
> intend
> >on representing direct and indirect relative clauses:
>
>Interestingly, Tirèlhat has been going in that direction. The personal
>pronouns have become attached to the verbs, and the subject pronouns are
>identical to the possessive prefixes that get attached to nouns.
Nifty! So I'm not mad!

>So these
>examples turn out as:
>
>of my seeing:  u lè-lizha-ri
>              GEN my-see  -ing
>that I see:   ni lè-lizha-ve-n
>             that 1s-see  -(evidential/tense/aspect suffixes)
>
> >     Direct relative clause (`that I see'):
> >         ...of my seeing...
> >
> >     Indirect relative clauses (`that sees me'):
> >         ...with my seeing...
>
>or "of my being seen"? (Tir. "u lèlizharuri").
There's no passive in Erëtas so I can't do that myself. In other news, I'm
thinking of using it as the protolanguage of another language or two. One
little change that's going to occur is that the gerund and auxiliary are
going to merge. It's already happening with the final `n' in the gerund at
this position being silent and nasalisation of the first consonant of the
auxiliary happening in Erëtas even though it's not yet noted in the grammar.

Dum de dum...

K.

--
Keith Gaughan <kmgaughan@...>
http://homepage.eircom.net/~kmgaughan/
I can decide what I give / But it's not up to me / What I get given -=Bjork=-