Re: English Construct State/Future Arabic

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

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