Re: polysynthetic languages

En réponse à Isidora Zamora :


>Thanks so much for the response, Christophe.
You're welcome :) .


>How do these work?  From what follows in the message, I can tell that they
>have differnent uses, but how are they different, and what makes them both
>genitive?
They are both genitive because they are both used to make nouns complete 
other nouns (with the other cases it's impossible - except the dative in 
some cases for what I know -. Those can only complete verbs). The 
possessive genitive, as its name indicates, is for true possession, the 
kind of possession described best by the verb "to own". The locative 
genitive is for other kinds of genitive relationships. For instance, in the 
phrase "the door of the house", the house doesn't *own* the door. It just 
indicates that the door is found inside (or at the limit of :)) ) the 
house. For such a relationship, Basque uses the locative genitive, giving 
"etxeko atea", with "etxe" meaning "house". It's called "locative genitive" 
because the kind of relationships it describes are usually spatial or temporal.


>Ok, cool.  I hadn't said so, but I was also interested in knowing whether
>there were natural languages that marked the verb for indirect object as
>well as subject and direct object.
There are quite a few around there :)) .


>This sound's interesting, but I can't quite grasp the concept.
I can understand that. It's quite a difficult concept to grasp. I can use 
it, but explaining exactly why I use it is more complicated.

>   Would you
>be willing to give me an example or two of it so I can understand?  (Basque
>or French will do, but I'm infinitely more familiar with French, even
>though I hardly speak it.)  You said "spoken French."  Does that mean that
>written French doesn't have this feature?
Indeed. It's considered "bad language" and doesn't fit the standards of the 
Written Form :))) .

Giving an example is difficult, because I can always give one but will find 
it difficult to explain the difference with the same sentence without the 
feature. It's usually used when you're telling someone (a good friend 
normally, although it can be used even in polite Spoken French) about 
something that happened to you, and it makes the sentences somehow more 
lively, because they include a reference to the listener (difficult to 
explain, I know). But imagine that I'm telling you about a person who has 
been extremely arrogant against me and how I handled it. If I wanted to say 
that I made him regret his arrogance, I may have said something like:

Et j'lui ai fait ravaler son caquet à c'coincé !

You needn't understand the sentence itself. The point is that as it is, it 
is a bit impersonal. To a French ear, it sounds flat, uninteresting. By 
telling the story like that, I'd bore the listener to death quite quickly. 
To make it more lively, and interesting to the listener, I'd say instead:

Et j'te lui ai fait ravaler son caquet à c'coincé !

The only difference is the addition of "te", the second person singular 
non-subject pronoun (affix actually in Spoken French :)) ). By adding it, I 
add the listener in the sentence, although the listener has nothing to do 
with the action described by the sentence. The pronoun is only there to 
make the sentence sound more lively, more interesting for the listener. 
It's difficult to explain exactly the difference between the two sentences. 
Maybe somebody else has an idea what I'm trying to explain :)) .


>I wonder why?
Me too :)) .

>   There is so much redundancy in the markings that it would
>certainly be possible to loosen the word order up to the degree that Latin
>did.  The marking system is certainly a lot more redundant than Latin's.
In my experience, word order rigidity and abundance of marks are not 
completely correlated. Look at Japanese. Despite the abundance of function 
marks (nouns and verbs are normally impossible to confuse in a sentence, 
and each noun has a function indicated by a postposition, even the subject! 
- when present at least :))) -), it is extremely rigidly verb-final.


>That's definitely an extra-cool feature.  That's something worth studying
>to see if I can use it in one of my conlangs.  (Actually, it's definitely
>worth studying just for its own sake because it's so extra-cool.  You
>seemed to imply that overdeclination can be used only under certain
>cirumstances.  It would be interesting to see what the constraints on it are.)
The main constraint is that the possessive genitive in -en doesn't allow 
much overdeclination. It allows the addition of the definite article -a (in 
the sense "the one of"), as in: "harotzaren etxea": "the blacksmith's 
house" -> "harotzarena": "the one of the blacksmith", but that's about it. 
On the other hand, the locative genitive in -ko allows many things. 
Addition of the article like the possessive genitive, but also addition to 
already declined forms like my example "urrezko", where the -ko was added 
to a form already in the instrumental case. Apart from that, it doesn't 
seem to have any constraints.

>>com.: comitative case
>
>Refresh my memory, please.  What is a comitative case?  (All of the syntax
>that they had us study in school was Chomskyan, and none of it was practial
>or real-world.)
Comitative case: case of accompaniement, corresponding to English "with" :)) .

>>loc.gen.: locative genitive
>
>This is that second type of genitve that you were talking about.  What
>exactly does it mean, and what makes it a genitive.
It is genitive, as I said, because a noun in the locative genitive must 
complete another noun. I've already explained earlier what it actually 
means :)) .

>   Is there also a plain
>locative case in Basque?
There is an inessive case which is also used as simple locative. Unlike the 
locative genitive, it's used only as verb complement and cannot have a 
temporal meaning.


Christophe Grandsire.
http://rainbow.conlang.free.fr
You need a straight mind to invent a twisted conlang. 

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