Ahzoh wrote: ↑08 May 2021 23:58
it would be so:
a)
Aḳālum uśśêkun âdī pariñtu
sun-FEM arms-3fs many-MASC vanish-3fs
the many-armed sun vanished / the sun with many arms vanished
b)
Uśśê Aḳālam âdī pariñti
arm-CNS sun-FEM many-MASC vanish-3ms
the many arms belonging to the sun vanished
It is a difference over whether the possessor is more salient or whether the possessed thing is more salient.
But your translations don't match this. In your translation, the difference is that the actual roles are altered: in a), the sun is the subject, and in b) the arms are the subject (semantically, at least, though the change in gender marking on the verb seems to confirm that this is syntactic as well). That's nothing to do with salience!
Indeed, a) doesn't really look like a possessive construction, but a comitative of some kind. "The sun
with her many arms vanished" (the preposition not being explicit; or you could say that the relative existential verb (the sun, her many arms existing, vanished) is missing, etc). Of course, there's a possessive inside this - 'her arms'. How would you say "her arms" in a different context? [it would seem odd to have a form of possession that's only used within a comitative (or relative) phrase.
I do not think it would be possessor inversion as that implies that the possessors themselves are being inverted, when the possessor (the sun) stays the same in all instances, it is only the order of possessor and possessed that changes.
Yes, when the order of two things changes, this is what is meant by "inversion".
EDIT: to be clear, I think that what your language is doing is not permitting marked possessors to be arguments of the verb. This is very common. Instead, the possessor is extracted, and a subordinate clause of some sort (which could be a relative clause, a participial clause, a prepositional phrase, etc) is used, co-referencing the possessor anaphorically. This is, again, perfectly ordinary, and indeed is what English does. "John's bleeding arm stains the carpet" > "John with his bleeding arm stains the cabbage" / "John who has a bleeding arm eats cabbage" / "John, arm bleeding, stains the carpet", etc.