Re: Ergativity

Just to wind some more people up lol, since I've already upset quite a
few, does the term agglutinating when contrasted with isolating mean
much at all? As far as I can determine the main differences are that
people who speak agglutinating languages want to write their morphemes
together as big words and only stress one syllable in each big word, and
people who speak isolating languages want to separate all the bits in
some way and sometimes stress many of them. Other than that both
agglutinating and very isolating languages tend to have very strict
order in which the parts of the sentence can occur, and I think someone
already said this but I'm not sure there's a massive amount of
difference. I would put more into the distinction between
agglutinating/isolating languages and inflecting and fusional ones than
between agglutinating and isolating... Although now I think of it,
there's nothing to prevent an isolating language from having words that
help mark verb tense aspect etc and noun case (Japanese has post
positions which mark case doesn't it? I always wondered what the
difference is between those and inflected cases... a la latin) which
combine many meanings and so perhaps the most important distinction is
combining many meanings into the same morpheme/word, and having a
morpheme/word for each meaning. The problem with language is it seems
the more you learn about the categories people use to describe language,
it seems that you suddenly find out from everyone else or from thinking
about it that those categories are really completely inadequate to the
task.
 That's what the recent argument was about after all. I wanted to apply
the definition of ergative more strictly than others felt was right or
read too much into the description, and what I eventually after thinking
about it understood was that.... I still believe that what I was arguing
should happen in a typical ergative language, but this evening I
realised that what everyone else knew was that there was no such thing.
As I said before, I'm beginning to think a lot of linguistic terms like
ergative are practically useless on their own for describing a language,
and that the only way is to read the details. :) So I guess what I'm
saying is, I think I was right in that if I found a language which was
perfectly ergative I think that's how it would do it, and I was wrong in
that I expected the term ergative to mean too much. I'm sorry for
bringing the topic up again... I'll shut up now... after pissing
everyone off I just went off and had a think, and thought I'd write more
drivel in the hope of demolishing what was left of any respect anyone
had for me. ;) I'm good at talking as well as arguing lol.
 I think after I've finished spanish in a year or two or however long it
takes, thanks to Andreas' reassurance I'll probably go onto swedish or
finnish perhaps. :) I haven't really done much conlanging recently
because to be honest I've been busy learning spanish as I said, and I
felt that too much work on a conlang would confuse me when it came to
the spanish I was practicing. I think I might start again though soon...
I'll try to make an ergative language without a single trace of
accusativity lol even though its probably been done a thousand times
before. I'll probably throw in inflected prepositions as well, since the
topic came up on the list recently and I liked the idea. Also, can
anyone tell me of a natlang which has a bilabial trill? Its easy to
pronounce, but about 1 time in ten it kind of collapses into a single
puff of air rather than a trill when I do it... sounds a bit like a p
when it collapses.

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