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Re: English Construct State/Future Arabic

From:Tristan <anstouh@...>
Date:Saturday, February 23, 2002, 1:43
On Sun, 17 Feb 2002, Nik Taylor wrote:

> "Anthony M. Miles" wrote: > > > > 1) > > I was trying to construct a future variety of English, and I wondered: > > given the English speaker's tendency to slur the preposition 'of', > > would the development of an English construct state be likely? > > Sample: > > haus > > hausV > > hauz@z > > hauz@zV > > Seems not improbable to me. Altho, I'd be more likely to posit the > preposition becoming a prefix. At any rate, it seems to me that it > would be unstable, having a tendency to be completely dropped.
v I kinda think that it'll be a suffix---that's how it's currently used. And English much prefers a word ending in a vowel than one starting in one, 'specially an unstressed one. It would, however, not replace 's because it would be applied to the word that *gets* owned or whatever, rather than the one that does the owning (is there a term for this?). At any rate, most of my peers and myself tend to have the word 'of' treated much like 'an'---it's /@/ before a consonant, /@v/ before a vowel. Tristan

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Danny Wier <dawier@...>
Danny Wier <dawier@...>
Danny Wier <dawier@...>