Suffixaufnahme

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Suffixaufnahme (German for "suffix-absorption") is a linguistic phenomenon whereby a genitive noun declines to match its head noun, and vice-versa. It is present in Old Georgian and some other Caucasian and ancient Middle Eastern languages as well as many Australian languages, and almost invariably coincides with agglutinativity.

A subject, for instance, would be marked with a subjective affix as well as a genitive affix. In the sentence "The dog's tongue is blue", the word "tongue" would have a subjective affix, whereas "dog" would have both a subjective affix and a genitive affix.

A noun possessing another noun that possesses a noun would be marked with a subjective affix and two genitive affixes, to indicate that it is possessing a possessive. For example, in the sentence "The doctor's dog's tongue was blue", the word "doctor" would have a subject affix and two genitive affixes.

This happens sometimes in some Indo-European languages where declinable adjectives serve as genitives, for example:-

  • Latin vacca mea = "my cow"; vaccae meae cauda = "my cow's tail".

Contents

Languages with suffixaufnahme

Living languages

Dead Languages

Ancient languages

See also

External links