Talk:Status constructus

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[edit] Choice of languages to include

Why the emphasis on Arabic? I have added Hebrew and moved the reference to Egyptian to the top.

Also, is the mention of the Irish examples really necessary here? The only similarity is the non-use of the article with the head noun in the phrase. Wouldn't it be better mentioned under cross-linguistic differences in article usage? RJCraig 16:39, 7 January 2006 (UTC)

I (the original author of this article) didn't know Hebrew had the same grammatical feature. Actually I don't even speak Arabic, but I read about it in an Arabic grammar and remembered it. The main reason why I wrote this article was simply that it didn't exist yet - a thing that struck me. Caesarion 10:48, 24 January 2006 (UTC)

I mentioned the parallel with the Irish language mostly because it struck me as interesting. If there's a more appropriate location for it, I'd be happy to move it there. It was my first Wikipedia posting - I'm still learning the ropes. Frank gibbons 01:55, 24 January 2006 (UTC)

If we use the Irish examples, we might as well count English too -- i.e. we say "the student's mother," not "*the student's the mother." 198.150.76.150 13:51, 19 June 2006 (UTC)

Well, going solely by what this article says (I have no knowledge of Irish), I think it's odd that a language would prepend the definite article, but suppress it when a possessor is postpended. (Contrast it with French la mère de l'élève, Hebrew ha-'ima shel ha-talmid, English the mother of the student, and so on.) I don't know what the reason is, though; it might be that Irish has a state system analogous to the Semitic languages', or it might be something else. Ruakh 16:44, 19 June 2006 (UTC)

Any of you familiar with the old (crackpot?) idea that the Celts (and therefore their languages) were of Semitic origin? I think it was mostly based on typological similarities (VSO word order, prepositions with pronominal endings).

Anyway, before recent sociological developments, the indication of the definiteness of a noun (phrase) modified by post-pending (of a possessor) in English and related languages has largely been redundant. I mean, what exactly would "a mother of a/the/some student" have meant, traditionally?

As for the preposed examples, the possessive noun (phrase) itself acts as a determiner (just like the "possessive pronouns") and multiple occurrence of determiners of the same category is ungrammatical: *the my mother, *my the mother, *the student's the mother, *a student's the mother.

RJCraig 05:36, 20 June 2006 (UTC)

I'm sorry, but your explanations seem weak. Firstly, "Recent sociological developments" are not responsible for the one-to-many nature of some possessor-possession relationships; it's hard to imagine such a thing with mother, but very easy to imagine such a thing with friend or book or sister. Secondly, while it's true that "the possessive noun (phrase) itself acts as a determiner" in English — assuming we restrict consideration to preprended 's phrases — that doesn't explain anything about Irish. (Note that in many languages, such as French and Spanish, possessive noun phrases are never determinatives, and in others, such as English and Hebrew, they don't have to be determinatives, as there exist both determinative and adjective forms.) You need to say something about Irish to explain if it has the same sort of phenomenon as the Semitic status constructus. Ruakh 12:19, 20 June 2006 (UTC)

You're quite right; I was thinking only of the parental egs. My bad!

"Postpended NPs", even those in possessive case in English (a friend of Ruakh's), are firmly ensconced in prepositional phrases in both English and the Romance languages; this is why they "are never determinatives". (BTW, what are you referring to by "adjective forms" of possessive NPs?)

As for addressing your question about Irish, I wasn't. I'm more familiar with Scottish Gaelic, but even then I'd have to pull out the books to check the facts and find appropriate examples. My guess is that even if the languages are moving toward the development of a Semitic-style state system, the noun forms in question are still genitives and Irish & Scottish Gaelic still firmly within the IE fold. (The marking of nouns for genitive case, by the way, can, depending on gender, involve changes to the vowel of the final syllable of the word and suffixation of case endings in addition to the word-initial consonantal "mutations" mentioned in the article.) RJCraig 15:26, 20 June 2006 (UTC)

Re: your paragraph starting "'Postpended NPs'": 100% agreed. (By the "adjective form," I just meant the postpended "of __" or "of __'s"; I suppose I should have said "adjective-phrase form.")

Re: the Celtic languages as IE vs. Semitic: Oh, I agree that they're certainly Indo-European, and not at all Semitic; but that doesn't mean they can't have features that are normally thought of as Semitic features, and if they do, then it makes sense to mention Celtic languages in articles about those features.

Ruakh 16:36, 20 June 2006 (UTC)

Actually, on second thought we don't completely agree. I see the prepositional phrase as being the possessor phrase, rather than as containing it as I take it you do. That is, in a friend of Ruakh's, I view of Ruakh's as the possessor phrase, whereas I take it you view Ruakh's as the possessor phrase. (I guess both viewpoints make sense, but mine is how I'm used to looking at it, and I think it makes more sense diachronically speaking; in French and Spanish at least, the de __ periphrasis is the standard replacement for the Latin genitive, and appears even when the old genitive was a verb argument rather than another noun's possessor.) Ruakh 16:44, 20 June 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Arabic & Hebrew differences

I'll have to check but IIRC the construct in Hebrew is a bit different from that in Arabic. It might be worthwhile to divide the article into sections such as "The construct in Arabic" and "The construct in Hebrew". RJCraig 16:52, 7 January 2006 (UTC)

[edit] NPOV issues; feminine -t in Arabic and Hebrew

In Classical Arabic, words in the status constructus can never get pausal pronunciation. In dialects and loosely spoken substandard Arabic, they can, when the following word begins in an article. In such a case, the above example would run 'Umm-'al-shaikh jamillah. -- Not NPOV; should be cleaned up to say something to the effect of "in spoken dialects of Arabic" or "in some spoken varieties of Arabic," or something similar. I'm not changing it myself because I don't personally know the facts of which varieties allow that. Also, we should probably have a page pausal pronunciation or pausal form (but, again, I don't know enough about it to make one).

Also, we should mention the final -t of (at least some) feminine construct state nouns in Arabic and Hebrew, which alternates with 0/h. 198.150.76.150 14:04, 19 June 2006 (UTC)