Re: Ergative Construction?

En réponse à William Annis <annis@...>:

>
>         Now this is very odd.  After years of looking, I finally found
> a Sumerian grammar in English (technical German is slooooow reading
> for me), and it seems Sumerian has this singular/plural verb
> difference,
Indeed! In the little booklet I take my examples of ("La Structure des
Langues", collection Que sais-je ?), Sumerian is listed with Ainu, Mundang and
Tuburi (languages of Tchad), some languages of North America, Oural and New-
Guinea, as languages where it's the form of the verb ("the verb takes an affix
or even has its root changed" is the translation of the words used by the
author) which indicates the plurality of the subject, of a complement, or both.

 sometimes with suppletives filling out the possible
> forms.  From section 265 of "The Sumerian Language" by Marie-Louise
> Thomsen -- my copy arrived yesterday :) -- "to bring" has these forms
> (I'm omitting the cuneiform ident subscripts):
>
>     hamTu-form          marû-form
> sing.   de              tum, tum
> pl.     lah               lah
>
> "to go:" ('G' is the g with a tilde on it), from s.258.
>     hamTu-form          marû-form
> sing.   Gen              du
> pl.     (e)re            sub
>
> Is this a normal feature of languages with ergativity?
AFAIK, it's not related to ergativity. But among the languages listed above, I
know only a bit of Sumerian. So I don't whether all the languages above are
ergative or split-ergative or not.

  Of course,
> Sumerian is only ergative in the hamTu aspect (probably perfective),
> and is nom-acc in the marû aspect (probably durative), but I gather no
> language is purely ergative.
>
Try Basque! You'll have difficulties finding a language which is more purely
ergative than it! According to my booklet, 26% of the languages involved in the
study the booklet summarises (754 languages all over the world, far from the
5000 or more estimated, but quite a reasonable number for such a small book)
are uniformly ergative (46% uniformly accusative, 21% have split morphologies,
and 7% have structures that cannot be described as ergative or accusative).

He he, buying this booklet was one of the best things I ever did :) .

> --
> William Annis  -  System Administrator -  Biomedical Computing Group
> "When men are inhuman, take care not to feel towards them as they do
> towards other humans."                       Marcus Aurelius  VII.65
>
Beautiful sig! A way of being I always tried to keep, even though I didn't put
it into words.

Christophe.

http://rainbow.conlang.free.fr