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Re: English Construct State/Future Arabic

From:<kam@...>
Date:Monday, February 18, 2002, 23:17
On Sun, Feb 17, 2002 at 05:22:45PM +1100, Tristan wrote:
> 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. > > 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.
Hmm, like /glas @ bI:/ , /paInt@ mILk/, there used to be adverts in the UK urging us to "drink your daily pinta", "order an extra pinta" and so on, but I think this was largely the invention of the Milk Marketing Board, not a genuine colloquial expression. You can get something like this when Celtic place names are anglicised. In Scotland for example, a name like _Ach[adh] an draighinn_ "(the) field (of) the thorntree" would be anglicised to _Auchindrine_ and so on, then the _Auchin..._ bit is generalised to mean "field" and used in names like _Auchinbegg_ "small field" where there shouldn't be an article at all. The same thing happens in Cornwall with _Praze an ..._ "(the) meadow (of the) ..., "_Park an ..._ "(the) enclosure (of the) ...". Of course the "of" is not expressed as such, unless the second word has a marked genitive, what's happening is the first word is getting the article added as a suffix. Dunno if this counts as a construct though. Both Hebrew and Arabic use this same "X the Y" construction, but where the first word has a construct state, that represents a shortened form.
> Tristan
Keith Mylchreest

Replies

John Cowan <cowan@...>
John Cowan <cowan@...>