Non-possessable vs. Possessable Nouns

The best topics from Languages & Linguistics, kept on a permanent basis.
Post Reply
Davoush
Sanci
Sanci
Posts: 67
Joined: Fri Sep 29, 2006 1:05 pm
Location: Liverpool, UK

Non-possessable vs. Possessable Nouns

Post by Davoush »

Apparantly in Maasai, a number of nouns cannot be gramatically possessed, so how does such a language express possession of these nouns?

For example, is possession of non-possessable nouns shown by some sort of preposition like 'the land to me' (my land)? Or maybe by some sort of relativiser 'the land which I own'?

Thanks

User avatar
Radagast
Lebom
Lebom
Posts: 97
Joined: Sat May 21, 2005 9:46 am
Location: Denmark
Contact:

Post by Radagast »

Maybe it just doesn't. WHy would you want to talk about owning the weather anyway?
Last edited by Radagast on Mon Mar 29, 2010 9:15 am, edited 1 time in total.
[i]D'abord on ne parla qu'en poésie ; on ne s'avisa de raisonner que long-temps après.[/i] J. J. Rousseau, Sur l'origine des langues. 1783

User avatar
Salmoneus
Sanno
Sanno
Posts: 3197
Joined: Thu Jan 15, 2004 5:00 pm
Location: One of the dark places of the world

Post by Salmoneus »

Well, sometimes non-possessable things CAN'T be possessed. If your culture has no concept of land possession, for instance, you don't need to say 'my land'.

Another thing is that possession is often marked on special words. So "my land" is "thing-my land"."Thing" may be the only such marker, or it may change to reflect differences in semantics or syntactic noun class: "flat_thing-my land" vs "human_thing-my brother"
Blog: [url]http://vacuouswastrel.wordpress.com/[/url]

But the river tripped on her by and by, lapping
as though her heart was brook: Why, why, why! Weh, O weh
I'se so silly to be flowing but I no canna stay!

User avatar
sangi39
Avisaru
Avisaru
Posts: 402
Joined: Sun Mar 01, 2009 3:34 am
Location: North Yorkshire, UK

Post by sangi39 »

"the land that I own" is the example given by wikipedia for "my land" but it's uncited. My guess would be that one set of nouns are capable of being expressed as possessed by an explicit morphological possessor while another set needs some kind of indirect syntactic way of marking possession, e.g. "my father"="my father" vs. "my land"="the land that I own" or "the land that is with me".
You can tell the same lie a thousand times,
But it never gets any more true,
So close your eyes once more and once more believe
That they all still believe in you.
Just one time.

User avatar
linguoboy
Sanno
Sanno
Posts: 3681
Joined: Tue Sep 17, 2002 9:00 am
Location: Rogers Park/Evanston

Post by linguoboy »

I'm reminded of that awesome anecdote related by William Bright:
Sapir is said to have asked an Ojibwe to say “my skunk, your skunk” etc., in order to test a morphophonemic hypothesis; but the Indian rightly refused , saying “No Ojibwe owns a skunk.” The fact that no Ojibwe owns a skunk is a cultural fact which should not be falsified.

User avatar
Khvaragh
Lebom
Lebom
Posts: 83
Joined: Mon Oct 09, 2006 8:40 pm
Location: Cairo, Egypt
Contact:

Post by Khvaragh »

In Egyptian Arabic, many loanwords are treated as grammatically disallowing possession. For example, saying /kumbijutari:/ *"my computer" sounds weird to native speakers, if not entirely ungrammatical. Instead, the possession is switched to a stand-in noun /bita?\/ "thing" which is coordinated with the actual noun in an iDafa phrase: /kumbijutar bita?\i:/ literally: "the computer of my thing." This can also happen in MSA, with a different structure: /alkumbijutar al:aDi: ?amliku/ "the computer which I own"
لا يرقىء الله عيني من بكى حجراً
ولا شفى وجد من يصبو إلى وتدِ
("May God never dry the tears of those who cry over stones, nor ease the love-pangs of those who yearn for tent-pegs.") - Abu Nawas

User avatar
Radius Solis
Smeric
Smeric
Posts: 1248
Joined: Tue Mar 30, 2004 5:40 pm
Location: Si'ahl
Contact:

Post by Radius Solis »

An additional possibility is to just use synonyms or near-synonyms, that would be clear enough in the given context. Perhaps you cannot grammatically possess "land", but it's likely you could still say something like "my location" with this being understood as the particular land you normally work with. Compare "Let's go to your place tonight." In the rare event you need to indicate possession of rain, depending on the context, "my water" or "my falling water" might do perfectly fine.


As well, I'm with Radagast on the "maybe it just doesn't" answer. Grammatically unpossessable nouns seem likely to reflect cultural attitudes in which not everything is considered to be logically possible to possess, perhaps because their core notion of what 'possession' means is different from ours. I wouldn't be surprised if there are cultures in which possession is seen as a primarily physical relationship, for instance, making it bizarre to speak of owning something intangible. Such constraints are often reflected in grammar.

On an infrequent basis, speakers can and will butcher the grammar of their language to get across an idea they don't see any other satisfactory way to express.

User avatar
sangi39
Avisaru
Avisaru
Posts: 402
Joined: Sun Mar 01, 2009 3:34 am
Location: North Yorkshire, UK

Post by sangi39 »

I found an article online (page 219 of http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=c8fD ... on&f=false ) which basically says that what counts as possessable and non-possessable differs from dialect to dialect along a generally fixed hierarchy, apparently depending on what degree the speaker feels they will be affected by the object in question when it is affected by something else.
You can tell the same lie a thousand times,
But it never gets any more true,
So close your eyes once more and once more believe
That they all still believe in you.
Just one time.

TomHChappell
Avisaru
Avisaru
Posts: 807
Joined: Wed Dec 28, 2005 2:58 pm

Post by TomHChappell »

If I'm talking to my relatives in distant parts of the country, or even on other continents, we may say "my weather" or "our weather" or "your weather". So there's some purpose in some languages to having a "possessive" phrase about weather.

If I'm discussing planets orbiting other stars than Sol, I might refer to their primary star as "their sun", and to Sol as "our Sun". So, even though admittedly no-one can own a star or the Sun, when discussing extra-Solar planets it might be worthwhile to use a "possessive" phrase about a sun.
Same for a "moon"; in fact, one might easily say "Mars has two moons".
But in some languages, not only can't "Sun" and "Moon" be possessed; they also can't be plural.

The song "A Song of Peace", ordinarily set to the tune of Sibelius's "Finlandia", allows a person to "possess" a country, and allows a country or a land to possess "skies" and "sunlight". Even though, technically speaking, nobody can "possess" a sky, nor the light of the sun; and no single citizen can "possess" his/her country.

In a language in which skies and oceans and weather and the Sun and the Moon and land are "unpossessible", odds are these things can still be said; but they'd be said otherwise. One might say "the country I live in", "the ocean nearest us", "primary star" or "the star it orbits", "satellite", "what it's like where I am vs what it's like where you are", or any of the circumlocutions or alternative means of expression mentioned by previous posters, or probably others noöne here has mentioned yet.

User avatar
Miekko
Avisaru
Avisaru
Posts: 364
Joined: Fri Jun 13, 2003 9:43 am
Location: the turing machine doesn't stop here any more
Contact:

Post by Miekko »

TomHChappell wrote:If I'm talking to my relatives in distant parts of the country, or even on other continents, we may say "my weather" or "our weather" or "your weather". So there's some purpose in some languages to having a "possessive" phrase about weather.
I'd find a phrase like 'the weather over here is ...' much, MUCH more natural.
< Cev> My people we use cars. I come from a very proud car culture-- every part of the car is used, nothing goes to waste. When my people first saw the car, generations ago, we called it šuŋka wakaŋ-- meaning "automated mobile".

Nadreck
Niš
Niš
Posts: 4
Joined: Wed Mar 29, 2006 11:40 am
Location: Los Angeles

Post by Nadreck »

I've always thought that "possessive" really should just mean "identified by a relationship to me (or you or him or them)", and not ownership in any sense. After all, one can imagine a discussion like this of two prisoners in a cruel jail:

"What is your torturer doing to you?"
"My torturer is (insert something bad here). How about yours?"
You can't focus on blue sky.

User avatar
Nortaneous
Sumerul
Sumerul
Posts: 4544
Joined: Mon Apr 13, 2009 1:52 am
Location: the Imperial Corridor

Post by Nortaneous »

Nadreck wrote:I've always thought that "possessive" really should just mean "identified by a relationship to me (or you or him or them)", and not ownership in any sense. After all, one can imagine a discussion like this of two prisoners in a cruel jail:

"What is your torturer doing to you?"
"My torturer is (insert something bad here). How about yours?"
nah that's the genitive

it isn't that hard to imagine a lang where the possessive is only used for possession and the relational is expressed with another case (dative, maybe?)
Siöö jandeng raiglin zåbei tandiüłåd;
nää džunnfin kukuch vklaivei sivei tåd.
Chei. Chei. Chei. Chei. Chei. Chei. Chei.

User avatar
nebula wind phone
Sanci
Sanci
Posts: 67
Joined: Wed Mar 02, 2005 10:58 am
Location: Austin, Texas, USA
Contact:

Post by nebula wind phone »

In K'ichee' it's mostly heavenly bodies that are truly unpossessable. I imagine it's like how the Ojibwe don't own skunks; the K'ichee' don't own moons.
"When I was about 16 it occurred to me that conlanging might be a sin, but I changed my mind when I realized Adam and Eve were doing it before the Fall." —Mercator

User avatar
Whimemsz
Avisaru
Avisaru
Posts: 690
Joined: Fri Jun 20, 2003 4:56 pm
Location: Gimaamaa onibaaganing

Post by Whimemsz »

(Although, for the record, you can, in fact, use "skunk" with possessive morphology in Ojibwe: inzhigaagom "my skunk". It's just not something one would ever really have any need to say. That is, it's semantically odd, but grammatically possible.)

User avatar
linguoboy
Sanno
Sanno
Posts: 3681
Joined: Tue Sep 17, 2002 9:00 am
Location: Rogers Park/Evanston

Post by linguoboy »

Whimemsz wrote:(Although, for the record, you can, in fact, use "skunk" with possessive morphology in Ojibwe: inzhigaagom "my skunk". It's just not something one would ever really have any need to say. That is, it's semantically odd, but grammatically possible.)
Unless, of course, you were talking about the crazy zhaaganaashag and their inscrutable ways.

User avatar
Whimemsz
Avisaru
Avisaru
Posts: 690
Joined: Fri Jun 20, 2003 4:56 pm
Location: Gimaamaa onibaaganing

Post by Whimemsz »

They own skunks? Aapiji maazhimaagozidogenag.

(Also, Jesus, man, is there any language you don't have some knowledge of?!)
Last edited by Whimemsz on Thu Apr 08, 2010 5:36 pm, edited 1 time in total.

tezcatlip0ca
Avisaru
Avisaru
Posts: 385
Joined: Fri Mar 12, 2010 6:30 pm

Post by tezcatlip0ca »

Try Sentinelese.

Post Reply