Re: Ergativity

Okay, I give in... *sigh* I don't want to argue anymore lol... even
though it makes no sense to me whatsoever I accept that people call
languages that do that ergative. I just don't accept that it makes
sense... I'm a mathematician, we like clear cut definitions for all our
terms. :D You wouldn't find someone saying something was a vector space
although "this axiom doesn't hold all the time, but never mind" lol.
Well, I hope you wouldn't.

>>even though the rice is actually the patient because a verb
>>in english must always have a nominative. You cannot say "cooked the
>>rice" to mean "the rice cooked". In ergatives it is supposed to be the
>>opposite, so I don't see how someone can say that an ergative language
>>
>>
>
>Well, English is not the measure for nominative-accusative languages. In
>Finnish, you can say "cooked the rice" (in certain constructions), and there
>are languages that are extremely liberal as far as that goes. An ergative
>system should supposedly not neccessarily be the opposite of the english
>accusative system. If you can say <cooked the rice<acc>> in some accusative
>languages, then why would <robert<erg> cooked> be impossible in ergative
>systems?
>
>
>

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