reflexive vs. suus 'make'.

[Koontz John E]

On Mon, 12 Aug 2002, R. Rankin wrote:
> The reason I included the statement [the only form I have] in my
> posting is that there ought to be at least two different forms at
> stake here: 'to make for oneself' and 'to make ones own'.  They ought
> to have different reflexes, but I'm not sure we're keeping them
> straight in our discussion.

In OP

base       dative         possessive (suus)    reflexive

gaghe      giaghe         gikkaghe             kkikkaghe

make       make for s.o.  make one's own       make for oneself

The forms for gaNze : giaNze etc, are analogous, but the root sense of
'demonstrate, behave like' tends to be glossed 'teach' in the dative,
i.e., 'to demonstrate to'.  This rather reminds me of the perfect of 'to
see' being 'to know' in Ancient Greek.  There's also gaNdha 'to donate' in
this group.  I think the other g-stems are intransitive.  Actually,
they're gaNz^iNga 'not to know how to' (presumably takes a clausal
argument) and gi 'to come home'.  If there are any more, I'm forgetting
them.

In principle, kkik-kaghe should mean 'to make onself' but obviously this
isn't a particularly useful form ouside of philosophy and the gloss I've
encountered is 'to make for oneself', Another verb like this is une 'to
search for, to hunt', which has a possessive ugine 'to search for one's
own' and a reflexive/reciprocal ukkine 'to search for for oneself'.

I suppose there may be a more insightful account of when the reflexive is
a reflexive benefactive than 'when it's not very useful as a reflexive',
but I'm afraid it escapes me.  There don't seem to be contrasting
'reflexive' and 'reflexive benefactive' forms, but there may be cases
where either interpretation is possible.  It's at this point that my more
or less morphological acquaintence with OP begins to break down.

Reflecting, I suppose it's possible that the possessive form here should
mean 'make for one's own' (that is 'make s.t. for s.o. who is one's own')?

Incidentally, one thing that puzzled me a bit about the possessive at
first was that I expected it to apply whenever any object was possessed.
However, in OP at least, it seems to be applied essentially for kin.  The
principle may be 'inalienable possessions' - another place where my
understanding is inadwquate.  It certainly isn't applied for things that
use tta or 'to have' or some other form of possessive construction, not
as far as I know.

It's easy (for me) to get the possessive construction crossed with the
dative experiencer verbs, like 'one's own to die' or 'one's own to be
burnt up' and so on.  However, the forms there are dative, and the
association is primarily via the English glossing.

JEK