Re: Gzarondan vindicated.
From: | John Cowan <jcowan@...> |
Date: | Thursday, September 30, 2004, 16:05 |
Adrian Morgan (aka Flesh-eating Dragon) scripsit:
> In English you can say "the dog's master" as easily as "the man's dog"
> but Gzarondan is a little more strict about the hierarchy of
> possession when there is one. Of course, not everything is possible in
> English - you can say "the book's cover" but I would be very surprised
> to hear "the cover's book". That said, I daresay that there are
> dialects of Gzarondan in which the retropossessive is not used.
In Lojban, the possessive relations (there are three: weak, strong,
and inalienable) are fully reversible: "the cover's book" is just
as perspicuous as "the book's cover" (and could be expressed by the
strong possessive, since books don't normally have multiple covers nor
vice versa). If you saw my arm and wondered whose it was, someone could
tell you
la djan. du ta po'e le birku
John is that-one of:inalienable the arm
thus classifying me as inalienably posessed by my arm instead
of vice versa.
--
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