Richard:
> Except that 'John's own book' makes sense grammatically,
> whereas 'John own book' has to be explained as a simplification.
So be it. The point is that in Guyanese there is no distinction
made between "John" (nominative) and "John's" (genitive) just
as there would have been no distinction if *-yo wasn't tacked
on. Likewise, the Guyanese at risk of losing the contrast of
the genitive with the default endingless case chose "own" to
carry the genitive meaning as the two cases merged. Exactly
the same was being done in IE where some paradigms were at
risk of case merger unless something was to be done about it.
In that way *-yo is like "own" in English or a possessive
suffix in Hungarian which is not to say that I think that *-yo
had exactly those meanings. Merely that the grammatical parallel
is there and fairly common overall.
> The possessive suffix is mandatory in the Hungarian construction.
> It's the genitive ending that's optional!
Yes... but as you can see, *-s- is _mandatory_ here, not optional,
otherwise we'd have **-o-yo. So it is the old genitive, no doubt
about it. The *-yo is also needed here though because it is
identical with the nominative. So what I'm saying doesn't
contradict Hungarian at all. It's precisely parallel to it.
Me:
> We pick what is logical and we base it on what we observe. We
> observe that *-yo is endingless. We observe that endingless
> locatives exist whereas endingless nominatives (I mean true ones,
> not those caused by Nominative Loss) are restricted to the
> inanimate.
Richard:
> Oh yes they do! Consider the wolf's knee: *wl.pWosyo g^onu
Erh, *gonu is inanimate so it's supposed to lack *-s. And I presume
that you made a mistake above with the typing. You seem trapped
between two taboo variants of the sacred animal in question:
*wlpo- and *wlkWo-.
= gLeN