Re: Nominative Loss. A strengthened theory?

--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, enlil@... wrote:

> Genitive *-syo is a composite of genitive *-s after thematic
> and an endingless locative *ya (later *yo- with a new locative)
> with the intended meaning of *[X-s-ya Y] as "Y with which (is)
> X" or simply "X's Y". So postposed *yo forms the start of a
> clause "with which". To add nominative *-s (or even **z, now
> senseless at this point) after *yo only exascerbates the
> semantics.
>
> A nominative *yos would convey "Y which (is) X" falsely
> expressing an equation rather than the proper commitative
> relationship that a locative expresses. The whole reason for
> the application of *-yo here was to disambiguate it from the
> identical nominative, so *s in *-syo cannot be given any
> meaning other than _nominative_ in these constructions despite
> the fact that we linguists know that it was originally a
> genitive.

I think that is pushing it a bit far. It could be that the phrase
would express possession far more often that it expressed
apposition, so they were specialised to the longer form expressing
possession and the shorter from expressing apposition.

> Further, possession with the locative is supported
> by Turkish and therefore a fully natural solution.

Could you explain the Turkish construction to me, please. The only
locative constructions I can think of are <possessed> <preposition>
<possessor> - i.e. the adposition governs the possessor. Even if
the construct case construction is viewed as <possessor> in
<possessed> (e.g. 'It hit him in the arm' = 'It hit his arm'), the
expansion as you see it seems to be <possessor> in which
<possessed>. As the noun phrase cases would then be marked on
the 'possessor', the composed genitive ought to have nominative and
oblique forms at the very least - both *-osyo and **-omyo.

I much prefer the suggestion that the relative pronoun was an
uninflected particle, as in non-standard English 'as' (e.g. 'It's
the poor as gets the blame.')

Richard.