gestaltist wrote: ↑10 Jan 2018 10:44
ixals wrote: ↑09 Jan 2018 20:56
Why would that be an adjectivizer, if you don't mind asking?
Well, OK, this comment was more provocative than it was useful. I think that if you have two GENs, one would likely function as an adjectivizer of some sort. So in fact, I think "tree ADJZ fig" and "tree ADJZ fig GEN 1s" would be more likely than the absolute right-to-left order you proposed. In theory, two GENs are possible but I think if there is more than one, they are more likely to be divided by function (e.g., adjectivization) than by nesting, as you propose. I might be wrong, though.
Ok, your comment felt a little bit cheeky but I didn't want to say anything
I get what you mean, it felt unnatural to me, too, so that's why I wanted to ask in this thread. My reasoning for the idea was that the same word (in this case "a") repeated sounded bad to the speakers, so one would be replaced with another word. The last one to be changed makes more sense though, to be honest. What about the following idea?
At the beginning, there was a preposition marking the possessed noun.
cə acá a kur
POSS hand GEN animal
"animal's hand" > "paw"
cə acá cə a kur a ke
POSS hand POSS GEN animal GEN 1PS
"my paw"
Then "cə a" fuses to "ca" and then changes back to "cə" because they sound similar and saying "cə ... cə" is easier than "cə ... ca" for the speakers. They would also have the tendency to say accidently, let's just assume that?
cə acá a kur
POSS hand GEN animal
cə acá cə kur a ke
POSS hand POSS animal GEN 1PS
And finally, the word marking the possession is left out of colloquial speech because the genitive marker is making it obvious that the preceding noun is possessed by the following noun. In longer instances, "cə" is retained to connect everything that still belongs, so that in the end we have this:
acá a kur
hand GEN animal
acá cə kur a ke
hand POSS animal GEN 1PS