Re: English Construct State/Future Arabic

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