Genitive Relationships

I think it's time to finally figure this thing out. Supposing we want to express something like "my father's house," through the years we've usually been thinking of something like

ka talo o ni ato
the=house GEN=1SG=father
"my father's house"

The big question in here is the o. Is it really necessary? What all is it used for? While trying to imagine what I'd do without o, it occurred to me that a structure like this might work:

ka talo ni ato
the=house 1SG=father

This follows our rule of head-modifier word order, and all; but would it work acceptably with the rest of the grammar? Well, just now I was thinking about direct objects. Take this sentence:

ni tata i loha ko sihi
1SG=dad 3P=love NONINST=vegetable
"my dad loves vegetables"

If this is how we're treating direct objects, and I think it is, then we should also have the following in parallel with our usual verb/noun/adjective series:

ka loha ko sihi
DEF=love NONINST=vegetable
"the vegetable lover"

ka mehe loha ko sihi
DEF=man love NONINST=vegetable
"the vegetable-loving man"

Note that we're going to have to look pretty critically at this last example, as this is basically a relative clause and I'm not totally sure that the clauses are going to be sufficiently distinct from each other articulated like this. But for the moment, let's assume this is okay to continue the argument.

If ka loha ko sihi means "the lover of vegetables," then we've got our genitive phrase! Of course, this is what a Latin speaker would call an "objective genitive," not a possessive genitive. But I really can't come up with a situation where there could be ambiguity between the two.

Well...except for one, whose importance I'm not yet sure of. How does one express the possessor of an agent? In most cases it's not problematic: "my father's builders" would be pretty unlikely to mean "the builders who built my father." But. I apologize for the following choice of verb, but it's the only one I can come up with that exhibits true ambiguity. What about e.g. "the emperor's killers?" I think a phrase like this probably occurs in Dune somewhere. There would be no way to know whether the assassins being spoken of in fact disposed of the emperor, or are employed disposing of others for the emperor. But maybe there's some way to resolve this by means of additional morphology. For instance, if we put a suffix on "killers" that indicates that the verb is the individual's profession (like we did with "wine salesman"), the ambiguity would no longer be pragmatically troublesome.

I'd like to take this moment to give thanks for the fact that this is not Loglan and therefore I don't need to worry about being able to clearly and unambiguously express every logical possibility.

Anyway, I feel like I'm getting away from my original topic. The point of all this is that I believe genitive relationships can be expressed simply by SPEC-NOUN SPEC-NOUN.

At this decision, though, a disquieting realization arrives. If we take our sentences about vegetables from above and use a pronoun object instead of a generic noun, look what happens:

ka tata i loha ni
DEF=dad 3P=love 1SG
"dad loves me"

ka loha ni
DEF=love 1SG
"the one who loves me," "the lover of me," "my lover"

We've just used ka X ni = "my X," instead of ni X which is what we've been fervently believing in for years. Uh-oh.

Okay, so I did think of this possibility originally -- in fact, in Ea opi le Koa I wrote ka tata o ni for "my dad." But I liked the way that saying ni tata was (1) shorter, and (2) treated "my" as a kind of determiner, which it is in a way.

Can I have it both ways? I don't think I can avoid the fact that there's no reason ka tata ni shouldn't mean "my dad," so what would be the difference between that and ni tata? Purely pragmatic? Hm. Well, variety is the spice of life, sure, but this is supposed to be an IAL.

There is one other disadvantage to doing pronoun possession this way, though I don't think it's strong enough to warrant throwing out the idea. If a postposed monosyllabic pronoun indicates possession, that means I can't use anything pronominal as a formative for my derivational system. That is to say, if ka talo ni = "my house," then there cannot be a word ka taloni. It's not that I'm into all that monosignificance crap, but this is just far too ambiguous for a well-designed system.

So, then, it looks like, instead of the 45-47 CV derivational formatives I was hoping for, I'm going to have to deal with around 40. Not such a huge loss, I suppose, but in a language with such a small phonology every such loss is pretty important. Here's what I have to exclude so far:

ka, a, ko, ti, i, ni, se, hi, nu

...plus whatever I end up choosing for 2nd and 3rd plural, if I decide I need them. Damn and blast.

Switching gears completely, I do want to mention that I've been throwing around the idea of providing optional reduplicative pronouns in addition to the usual monosyllabic forms. Thus, "I" would be either ni or nini, "you" = se or sese, &c. I momentarily thought, "wait! then possession could use the long forms, thus avoiding the derivation problem!" But ka talo nini is just far, far too long for a simple possessive phrase, in my opinion.

To sum up: "the X of the Y" is to be expressed as ka X ka Y. If Y is pronominal, the structure, at this point, can be either Y X or ka X Y.

Uh...one last thought before I give it a rest for tonight. If ka talo ni and ni talo are really equivalent, then either of the following would have to be acceptable for "my father loves me":

ka ato i loha ni
DEF=dad 3P=love 1SG

ka ato i ni loha
DEF=dad 3P=1SG=love

Um. Huh. This will require thought.