Case-forms of quoted phrases

[hwhatting]

Isn't the standard declension more of an affectation - the lower classes seem always to have declined these allegedly indeclinable words.

Depends on the word. I haven't heard anyone decline, e.g., kinó or kófe, even in colloquial speech. (I've once seen a partitive kófiyu, but that was in a text where someone tried for historical novelese, so that says as much about actual usage as someone trying for Ye Olde Englishe using forms like dost or maketh.)

[sasasha]

Consider a sentence like "The head of 'the dog's head' is 'head'". How is the genitive of the quoted phrase expressed in languages where the genitive is otherwise always expressed with an inflection of some sort (i.e. synthetically) and never with a preposition or similar?

Necroposting (ish) because of my current interest in ambiguity... Lojban has a bunch of operators for this, including zo and zoi (which quote out single words and blocks of text respectively), also la (which introduces names). They indicate, essentially, that what follows doesn’t participate in the normal grammatical rules of Lojban.

I liked learning that Russian does not do this, for titles, anyway. I’d be curious how it treats something like “Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone” where part of it is declinable and part of it is not.

[hwhatting]

I liked learning that Russian does not do this, for titles, anyway. I’d be curious how it treats something like “Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone” where part of it is declinable and part of it is not.

Can you give an example for what context you mean?

[xxx]

I don't know if this is relevant to the discussion,
in 3SDL there is never any preposition (nor ever any inflection either...) :

The head of 'the dog's head' is 'head'
`§¶uG¥Y®`§¶ub§b¥
(name (of) head and (of) begining (of) name (of) head (of) animal...)

nothing is grammaticalized,
it is a question of sticking the primitives in the right place,
to produce the desired meaning...

[Travis B.]

I don't know if this is relevant to the discussion,
in 3SDL there is never any preposition (nor ever any inflection either...) :

The head of 'the dog's head' is 'head'
`§¶uG¥Y®`§¶ub§b¥
(name (of) head and at begining (of) name (of) head (of) animal...)

nothing is grammaticalized,
it is a question of sticking the primitives in the right place,
to produce the desired meaning...

How do you distinguish possession/compounding from locatives?

[xxx]

semantically, as here with “head” and “beginning”...

[Qwynegold]

But a better way is to employ an epithet:
Fraasin "koiran pään" pää on "pää"
phrase-GEN dog-GEN head head COP head

The text here doesn’t seem to match the gloss — I would have thought it should be "koiran pää", not "koiran pään".

Oops, I messed that up. I've now fixed my original post. It's supposed to be exactly like you say.

[Imralu]

This present-past ambiguity also exists to an extent in French, Spanish, Latvian, Dutch, and German. It's one of those things you think shouldn't exist, but does.

Can you give any German examples of this? I can't think of any at the moment.

The only ambiguity I can think of is between a few infinitives and past participles, so you get:

Er wird vergessen.
= He will forget.
= He is/gets forgotten.

I can't think of any strictly present/past ambiguity in German.

[hwhatting]

The only ambiguity I can think of is between a few infinitives and past participles, so you get:

Er wird vergessen.
= He will forget.
= He is/gets forgotten.

I can't think of any strictly present/past ambiguity in German.

That's a nice one; as you note yourself, it's not present / past; for those not knowing German so well, it's future active vs. present passive.

[Zju]

All this discussion reminds me of case stacking (Suffixaufnahme). I'm surprised it hasn't (?) been brought up. It seems like quoted phrases would be handled pretty easily in languages such as Kayardild.