Genitive( was: Gentitive)

["Raymond A. Brown" <raybrown@macline.co.uk>]

Sorry about the typo in the original subject line!

At 21:28 15/11/97, Andrew Smith wrote:
>As I lie awake at night I find myself in agreement with Ray that casan ill
>of is the heartfelt choice, but llo chas di'll of is what the mind says.
>So I'm going to play my fiat here and go with llo chas di'll of.  I
>consider there are a number of good reasons to do this:
>
>A number of Romance languages have 'swallowed' -s, but no Romance language
>has resorted to using -n universally and I am reluctant to be innovative
>where analogical languages don't support it.

Yeah - I was a little hesitant about -n when I suggested it, but couldn't
think of an alternative. I remember being a little surprised that the
ending was universely accepted.

[.....]
>
>Having an Esperanta feel to the language is something I care to avoid,
>nothing personal, I just don't like Esperanto's grammer, it feels a little
>clunky to me.

There are quite a few things about Esperanto's grammar I don't like, but
that's another story.  Personally, I don't see that universal use of
-an/-on is any more Esperantine than, say, Spanish -s/-es in its being the
sole method of forming the plural.  What is Esperantine I think is the
artificial feel of -an/-on which is not unconnected with the first point
above.

Also I think one needs to be wary of making Brithenig a Romance
relexification of Welsh.  Brithening is first & foremost a Romance lang,
but one which was heavily influenced in its formative period by Celtic.
There are quite a few features common to the two, e.g. adjective following
nouns, two genders.

The consonant medial consonant changes in western Romance are similar to
the familiar soft mutation of Brittonic Celtic.  It's not IMO stretching
the point too much to assume that under Brittonic influence the medial
changes would've affected the initial consonants also.  (Indeed modern
Greek shows mutation under certain circumstances, cf. /ton/ + /pa'tera/ -->
/tomba'tera/ or, in some dialects, /toba'tera/.  [' denotes that the
following syllable is stressed]), hence Brithenig's soft mutation.
Brithenig's nasal & spirant mutations can also be justified.

But the Celtic genitive construction is arguably pushing things too far,
just as introducing verb initial position would be.  There's no support
from Romance AFAIK.

>For this reason I will begin revising the Brithenig homepage but replacing
>the Celtic form with the Romance form in this case.  It may not be so
>elegant but I confess it's sonorant sound is pleasing to me.
>
>Llo ho^n as the plural of ill of will be staying.  It is in good company.

Like Italian l'uomo ~ gli uomini.

A few distinctive plurals indeed are likely. Thus modern spoken French does
not normally have distinct sing. & plural forms, but a few remain, cf.
/Sval/ ~ /Svo/ (cheval ~ chevaux).

-----------------------------------------------------------------
And at 20:10 15/11/97, Padraic Brown wrote:
[.....]
>
>Would it be at all possible to retain this Celtic structure (and perhaps
>other archaic forms, as they're found) in poetry?  English, after all,
>retains gobs of archaic forms (mostly vocabulary) in (good) poetry.

Then we're back to the plural endings argument again.  If the construction
had never been found in the prose language then it's not an archaism; if it
had been found, then the Celtic influence is surely strong enough to have
ensured it's survival in normal language.

The archaisms of Brithenig, I'd have thought, would belong to Romance
rather than Celtic which would've been the innovating influence.

Ray.

[Perhaps a what-if Celtic survival might be considered.  What if Galatian
had survived in Anatolia (and perhaps been driven to the fastness of the
Caucasus by the Turks)?  :-)    ]