Talk:Construct state

message: I'll have to check but IIRC the construct in Hebrew is a bit different from that in Arabic. It might be worthwhile to divide the article into sections such as "The construct in Arabic" and "The construct in Hebrew". RJCraig 16:52, 7 January 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Arabic & Hebrew differences 

message: In Classical Arabic, words in the status constructus can never get pausal pronunciation. In dialects and loosely spoken substandard Arabic, they can, when the following word begins in an article. In such a case, the above example would run 'Umm-'al-shaikh jamillah. -- Not NPOV; should be cleaned up to say something to the effect of "in spoken dialects of Arabic" or "in some spoken varieties of Arabic," or something similar. I'm not changing it myself because I don't personally know the facts of which varieties allow that. Also, we should probably have a page pausal pronunciation or pausal form (but, again, I don't know enough about it to make one).
Also, we should mention the final -t of (at least some) feminine construct state nouns in Arabic and Hebrew, which alternates with 0/h. 198.150.76.150 14:04, 19 June 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  NPOV issues; feminine -t in Arabic and Hebrew 

message: I have corrected the translation of "Smikhut" from "support" to "contiguity". For support for dropping "support", please lookup סמיכות  here. RCSB 04:13, 22 August 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Smikhut 

message: Is not "Market Value" an example of the use of the construct state in English ("The Market's Value")? Although "Market" in this context would be traditionally charecterised as an adjective, it does not have adjective attributes ("adjective attributes" - another case in point). In contrast, in the case of  "Rental Value", "Rental" does have the -al ending. Any comments? RCSB 04:31, 22 August 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: "Market" here is not an adjective, it's what's called an attributive noun (or, more verbosely, noun used attributively). "Market value" is indeed a noun compound, which is indeed equivalent to Hebrew s'mikhut; but English does not have a construct state, does not mark attributive nouns for being attributive, etc.: it achieves the same result a different way. —RuakhTALK 05:48, 22 August 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Apart from that, the construct state is marked on the head, so if any part of market value were in the construct state, it would be value, not market. --Twid 08:39, 22 August 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Heh, good call. (I was thinking of s'mikhut as being marked on the "first noun" rather than on the "head noun", which in Hebrew is the same but in English is not.) —RuakhTALK 16:50, 22 August 2007 (UTC)

text: Well, it's used for the genitive relationship in that in languages that actually mark nouns for cases (German, Latin, Russian, Greek, Old English, fancy Arabic, etc.), the genitive case is used on non-head nouns in noun compounds; therefore, "genitive relationship" is really another way of saying "hey look, a noun compound!" (There are flaws in this model, but that's how people typically use the term "genitive" when not talking about any specific language.) I don't think Hebrew grammar needs to explain that a lot of these are calques from German, specifically, firstly because it's not like German originated this pattern — e.g., German gives us shul, not beit sefer — and secondly because I think nowadays as many are calques from English as from German. These terms' articles in Wiktionary — wikt:בית חולים, wikt:גן ילדים, etc. — should mention their German-ness in the "etymology" section, though. —RuakhTALK 21:08, 25 August 2007 (UTC)
replies: text:  I didn't mean explaining the etymology of the calques, I meant explaining the difference between a true use of s'mikhut for the genitive (for example: בית האיש) in contrast to its use as a noun compound (for example: בית האבן). But, if none of us is expert enough - then forget it.  As for בית ספר - I think it was modelled by Ben-Yehuda on the same German pattern mentioned above, even though in German that pattern doesen't exist in the case of "school", which BTW is Schule, not shul (have you been speaking too much Yiddish lately? :-). RCSB 22:47, 25 August 2007 (UTC)
replies: text:  But both of those are true uses of s'mikhut — and languages with true genitives would use the genitive for both; I don't speak German, but by my understanding, non-head nouns in German noun compounds are put in the genitive. It might be worth making clear, if it isn't already, that Hebrew s'mikhut compounds can correspond either to English "<noun> <noun>" or to English "<noun>'s <noun>", or sometimes to a single English word. (And sorry, I didn't mean that the spelling <shul> was the German word for school, any more than that the spelling <beit sefer> was the Hebrew. All I meant was that the school-word we get from German is shul. I don't know what "we" I meant there — it's not a Hebrew word — but yeah. I'll shut up now.) —RuakhTALK 23:56, 25 August 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  The construct state in English 

message: This article is completely wrong and should be removed.  First, "status constructus" is a term 19th century Orientalist grammarians used to refer to the first term of an Arabic idaafa construct; the first term was said to be "in" status constructus.  But Arabic  is not Latin; the term itself has nothing to say about the Arabic idaafa, and what this article does say about the idaafa is not only badly misleading but simply incorrect, as is often the case with grammatical writing that uses Greco-Latin concepts and terms to talk about Arabic.  النحوي (talk) 15:22, 14 August 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: I whole agree. The term "status constructus" AFAIK comes from Wright's A Grammar of the Arabic Language, where he translated traditional Arabic grammar terminology into Latin for the purposes of his grammar. The most common term nowadays in Arabic linguistics at least is "construct state" (though I think the rest of Semitic linguistics also uses this term), which is equated with the "definite" and "indefinite" state. I propose that this article's name be changed to "construct state".--205.250.223.14 (talk) 18:45, 24 December 2010 (UTC)
replies: text: The term (whether in Latin or English) has been fairly widely used for centuries in Western scholarly use (and Christian scholars were actually at first a whole lot more concerned with Biblical Hebrew than with Arabic), so it seems quite grotesque to propose that this article be deleted. AnonMoos (talk) 04:36, 25 December 2010 (UTC)
thread_title:  Accuracy 

message: The article currently ascribes to Prof. Zuckermann the observation that status constructus is no longer productive in Modern Hebrew; this is misleading, as this observation has been repeatedly made long ago, and is not new with Zuckermann.  I would fix it but I don't have references to earlier statements of this right now, so I'm just leaving this note in case someone else finds the time to fix this. Ijon (talk) 19:25, 29 September 2010 (UTC)
replies: text: And the example (em- vs. ha'ima shel) is not a great one, since that particular change is from a native lexeme that has a construct form to an Aramaic-derived lexeme that does not. This may be related to the general decline of the status constructus — the native lexeme is used in the plural, so presumably it would be used in the construct form if the status constructus were common enough to require that suppletion — but it's not a great example of it. —RuakhTALK 00:24, 30 September 2010 (UTC)
replies: text: The construct is not at all obsolete in Israeli Hebrew (though it is less frequent than in Biblical Hebrew, and less frequent in colloquial Israeli Hebrew than in more formal language). I'm going to change the article to point this out, with references from Glinert's and other grammars, when I get a chance.Linguistatlunch (talk) 12:34, 23 December 2011 (UTC)
thread_title:  Zuckermann not the source 

message: This is an encyclopaedia, not a specialist technical document. I have an IQ in the top 1%, but even so I find your jargon impenetrable: at the very least, you need to reduce the technical level of the introduction to allow an ordinary reader to find a way into the subject: keep the technical specificity to the main body. You also need to illustrate your meaning with some examples. As it is, I'm not going to try to understand what you mean because it's left me with a suspicion you're engaged in circular logic somewhere. -- 22:20, 19 December 2014 90.203.122.77
:It's an article on a grammatical/linguistic phenomenon which does not occur in the English-language (and which is a little strange according to English-native-speaker intuitions), so a certain amount of technical grammatical or linguistic vocabulary is almost unavoidable.  It is not densely technical compared to many math and science articles... AnonMoos (talk) 05:51, 20 December 2014 (UTC)
replies: text: I would have to agree with the jargon issue. In the opening, it refers to a first and second noun: "...The first noun is the nomen regens and the second the nomen rectum." What first and second noun? And this part is the ONLY place that those Latin terms are used (searching redirects back to THIS page), so what do they mean?? Talk about circular! WesT (talk) 21:47, 14 April 2017 (UTC)
replies: text: The most basic way to express it is that where English has "John's house" or "The house of John", the relevant Semitic languages would have "House-CONSTRUCT John", where House-CONSTRUCT indicates that the word meaning "house" is in the special construct state or possessed form... AnonMoos (talk) 22:14, 14 April 2017 (UTC)
replies: text: P.S. Nomen regens is Latin for "governing noun" and Nomen rectum for "governed noun".  They're actually old-fashioned 19th-century terminology, so I'm not sure why they're in the top section of the article. AnonMoos (talk) 22:44, 14 April 2017 (UTC)
thread_title:  Plain English 

message: Now also show how it works when the adjective refers to the second member of the construct phrase, not the noun in construct state.  
108.18.136.147 (talk) 21:08, 10 May 2015 (UTC)
thread_title:  Incomplete examples 

message: Currently, 'Construct state' in English wikipedia corresponds to 'Idafah (Arabic)' in Arabic wikipedia.  Meanwhile, the English page for 'Iḍāfah' has no Arabic version.  Perhaps the Arabic page should be changed from a translation of this page to a translation of the 'Iḍāfah' page.  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 142.196.181.137 (talk) 13:13, 8 May 2020 (UTC)
replies: text: Technically the term "construct state" refers to an ending on a noun (or other modification of the noun) to indicate that it's possessed, while the Arabic term seems to refer to the whole grammatical construction. AnonMoos (talk) 06:57, 21 June 2022 (UTC)
thread_title:  Translation between English / Arabic wikipedia pages