Re: Possession and genitivity

On this subject, I might as well quote the five types of "possessive" suffix
in Suzette Haden Elgin's Laadan:

-tha -- for possession "by birth"(like "your hand" and "your mother")
-the -- "for no known or acknowledged reason"
-thi --- "by chance"
-tho -- "by law or custom or gift etc."
-thu -- " 'false'  possessive . . . a phony ownership, marked in English by
'of' but really involving no possession, as in 'a heart of stone' or 'a
collection of books' "

While I was at it, I looked up the possessives in M.A.R. Barker's Tsolyani,
but they seem rather ordinary:

**As in English, there are two ways of expressing possession: /hi-/ (a
locative prefix) and /-mra-/ "-'s."  They both mean the same.  /mra-/ is tending to
become obsolete except with demonstratives and pronouns. . .**

Doug